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As marketing budgets get sliced and diced, publishers need to target the audience segments that matter most.
In 1985,1 stood in line at a Pizza Hut in Houston, Texas. The woman in front of us ordered a large pizza and a Diet Coke. As her order rang up on the cash register the man behind the counter asked if she would like the pizza cut into eight slices or ten?
"Eight. I could never eat ten," she replied as she dug through her purse looking for her wallet.
Even as an eleven year-old, I was amused.
The fact is, the marketer's pizza isn't getting any bigger, it's just getting sliced more ways. In the 1980's a chief marketing officer's pizza pie might have only been sliced into seven big slices: print advertising, television advertising, radio advertising, out-of-home advertising, direct mail, events, and public relations. Today, that same pizza is being sliced into insanely smaller and smaller pieces that now include search engine marketing, social media, display advertising, email marketing, native advertising, and content marketing (to name just a few.)
So, across today's marketing landscape marketers are buying more but magazines are getting paid less. If we're going to be successful in the highly-fractured media landscape of tomorrow, we must stop forcing the marketer to slice the pie more ways and start leveraging budgets from the CMO's growing slices.
One of the pizza slices...