For almost a decade now, I’ve had the pleasure of shaping young minds in the Webster University Video department. This week, I greeted a fresh class of twenty-something (and older) producing students, eager to embark on the path of becoming a video, film, or television producer.
During a vibrant discussion about the evolution of video over the past decade, a young man sitting in the back row offered up this phrase, “The Fractured Audience”.
I love it. And, in the true spirit of artists and teachers around the world, I am going to steal the phrase from him, and adopt it as my own.
The Fractured Audience. It sounds almost dangerous, doesn’t it? You can picture this group of people, sitting together in a movie theater or in a living room or wherever, and then, BAM! They break apart and each sits alone, consuming their content on a phone, a computer, a tablet, watching what they want, when they want to.
But, this is also where it gets exciting. We don’t have to be everything to everybody. We don’t need a focus group that has a butcher, a baker, and a candlestick maker in it, we just need to know which piece of this fractured audience is OUR audience, and speak only to them. Content producers can hone in on people who share their aesthetics, business owners can target only those clients that they really want to work with, and artists can build their own unique tribe of followers. The Fractured Audience is not a challenge. It’s an opportunity. And a great one.
If you need help identifying which piece of the audience is yours, let’s get together and explore it. Let’s find them, let’s craft messaging and video that is just for them, and let’s have some fun doing it.
To a great 2015.
