Bringing Traditional Media Online

During our past two lectures on optimizing organic and paid search, the benefit that search creates for traditional media left me thinking about the industry's evolution in this regard. It was stressed that search is the bottom of the funnel where the benefits of capturing a consumer's attention through a TV, radio, or magazine ad are realized as the individual then searches that subject and is hopefully connected to a page that allows them to convert.  As we progress, I have no doubt we will be connecting more of our devices to the Internet (TVs, cars, etc) and that this will bring about a scenario where these traditionally offline touch points might now be brought online and allow us as marketers to collect much more useful data about how successful these touch points are in moving an individual down the funnel. For example, if your TV is connected to the Internet, I imagine a scenario where you purchasing TV ads becomes a dynamic exchange where based off an individual's "cookie id" you bid for what ad you are going to serve them and then can also completely track whether or not they go search for your product after the ad and develop legitimate conversion numbers for TV ads. The same example could be applied to radio ads once your car is connected to the Internet as well.

Who do I feel is best positioned to benefit from this? Why Google of course! Google has already launched Google Fiber in St. Louis, which will mark it's foray into the world of being an Internet Service Provider / taking over control of your television.

https://fiber.google.com/about/

There is also their work on the self driving car and Google glass as being other ways to bring data from traditionally offline interaction with media online. Within this sea of data clearly exists a great deal of opportunity but also what will seemingly be a drastically different media and marketing landscape from the one that exists today. Clearly the ones who will be best poised to take advantage of these changes are those that are staying on top of the digital marketing landscape as it exists today. Loads of data floating around, I look forward to seeing how we utilize it as we get more and more of it.