"Have you ever heard of Andy Williams?"

"John"

"John" is a high school junior who spent the last 5 years growing up in Southwest MO. Just back from a golf outing where he got to play with none other than the legend himself.

The Andy Williams theatre in Branson is a big deal in Southwest Missouri. From Halloween until Christmas, every news broadcast on every channel advertises Christmas shows at the Andy Williams theatre.

The marketers obviously know their target audience, and that "John" is not part of that audience.

What old style marketers have not grasped, is just how badly they are missing communicating with "John". He is not being reached by any traditional media format. He could care less about traditional media. He will spend hours texting his friends on his cell phone about things to go see and do, then go do those things.

Relevance

Thinking long and hard about the difference between the two communications paradigms, doing my best to consider them from distant memories of what it was like to be a teeenager, the difference is relevant content. More to the point, the ratio of relevant content to chaff. Every text message, receives a relevant and timely response. Until it doesn't, then you move on.

Every attempt to find information within big media information streams is surrounded by mountains of "junk". In the age of information overload, "John" knows how to tune out and ignore the "junk". Watching the local TV news last night it struck me just how much chaff us old timers have learned to endure. Well over half of this "news" was a blatant attempt to get me to go to this news station's web site.

I have seen their site, and it is an even higher ratio of chaff to content than their news broadcast! So I started copying raw images of web sites by many different traditional media outlets. The ratio - based purely on image surface area - of chaff to content is almost always higher than 80 percent. Worse still, the desired content is typically a paragraph or two of PLAIN TEXT. Relevant content is smothered and backgrounded with animations and multimedia effects designed to sell advertising to advertisers.

Opting Out

Presumably advertisers who pay enough can get a flashy bug or a dancing girl or a hot rod or whatever might make their advertising stand out from all the other advertising on the page. Pay enough, they might even get the top location on the page. Well, not the very top. It is the news station's site, so they of course get the page header, the page footer, and best location in the sidebars to promote their TV news broadcast. Shameless self promotion, bury the information stream in junk, us old timers are accustomed to it, "John" is not. Likely he never will be.

If big media efforts on TV news broadcasts at 25 percent to 50 percent chaff haven't reached "John" in the past 5 years, good luck reaching him in the next five dumping 80-90 percent chaff into the stream on line. It is not just my local news or their site, it is a universal problem. Not sure how we ever got trained to the point of thinking 20 percent content is an acceptable ratio. Youth are simply opting out, and good for them.

MORE..

• Craigslist.com craigslist.org - the perennial champion of providing desired content without chaff. They keep winning, despite efforts from players like Microsoft, Google, and eBay to unseat their position as the online classifieds leader. What is their secret? Could it possibly be providing what people want, when and where needed, without a lot of useless chaff in the stream? Hmmmm? Wired - Gary Wolf..
• Google wears the robe as the master of balancing desired content to chaff while including advertising in the stream. Proving that if consumers want something bad enough (rapid, pointed, powerful search of the entire WWW), they will put up with a LITTLE BIT of chaff.
• Publishers in smaller communities grasp the concept of chaff ratio. Maybe they are in closer touch with their community. Interesting to compare a google search results layout, to this small town publishing layout, more similar than different. Link to peabody KS article.
• The chaff to content ratio, the certainty of failure when you shove too much junk into the pipe, is not a new idea, just an idea that nobody in big media or corporate IT wants to acknowledge.. ..Mark Surman - "The Death of Marketing" 2004..
• It is all about value, people are instinctively great economists. Provide high value (Google), some clutter acceptable, otherwise, cluttering the stream just drives users away.
• Web ads don't work, well done web information sites are their own best promotion.