For the past week and a half I have been trying a little experiment with my media consumption habits.  I decided to go on a media diet and consume my news and information from online sources only.

I was well equipped electronically to begin my experiment as I use a Blackberry, a WiFi equipped laptop and a desktop PC at both home and at work.   I must admit that professionally, I was already fairly geared towards receiving my industry news and information via my admittedly excessive subscriptions to enewsletters and assorted RSS feeds.  I also have Facebook, Twitter and Linked In accounts and my iGoogle page configured to all the things I care about.  But I do tend to depend on various traditional sources for my local and international news as well as for personal interests, so I spent some time setting up my online alerts to be more inclusive of my total appetite of news and information needs.  Among these set-ups included keyword alerts at TweetLater.com, setting up additional email alerts from Google Email, and adding some RSS feeds to my Google Reader account.  I definitely felt sufficiently wired.

And what I experienced was sufficiently thorough.  Maybe too thorough!  For all of the keywords, topics and companies that I tagged to follow I felt as though I was getting what there was to know about them in my week and a half and I felt satisfied that I was properly tapped in.  But I have also decided that I could use a personal editor of sorts that could weed through the volumes of content and decide what was really important for me to read and what made it to the e-pile because if the way I had my filters set-up.  If due to a busy workload I had missed many of my alerts for the day, I felt overwhelmed when I turned my attention to them due to the sheer volume to sort through.

The convenience factor is hard to beat, however.  Having all of my sources literally at my fingertips at most moments of the day is priceless.  I found myself finding all sorts of unused, previously “wasted” pockets of time to grab a news alert here and there as I went through my day.  I read the morning news headlines while waiting for my kids to gather their belongings and head to the car in the mornings, I checked the weather for the rest of the week while the woman behind the counter made my lunch order and I pondered potential dinner recipes from my daily recipe feed while I was waiting at the doctors office.  Perhaps I am a bit spoiled, however, by my tech toys and I can’t help wonder if I would have liked my experience as well if I did not have the luxury of the portability I had in the handheld or laptop.  I doubt I would have dedicated as much time to my sources if I had to rely solely on my desktop computer.

What I felt overall through this experiment was a nagging pang for the loss of an experience.  I truly missed some of my traditional sources of news and information such as my weekly edition of People magazine and my daily morning habit of The Wall Street Journal and the experience of the moment when I am engaging with one of those sources.  One of the things that steered my into my career is my love of magazines.  Curling up with one of my favorite magazines is a treasured moment of down-time for me that I missed in this experiment.  Granted, I received my daily People e-headlines so I didn’t feel that I was uninformed during this experiment, but I did not feel the same emotional experience getting it from the screen as I usually do from the printed version read in a completely different setting.  My mornings were hard.  For thirty years I have grown up with the Wall Street Journal on the breakfast table and out of all the media outlets I touch in a day I would have to say this was one thirty-year habit that was difficult to break.  Again, I was receiving my appointed e-alerts to the news that mattered to me, but there was an element of the experience that I missed.  I can assure you that as of tomorrow, I am going to be reading the hard-copy of my morning Journal and my issue of People magazine this week, but I think I will continue to follow most of the feeds I have set-up and work on culling them down to the really important bites.

Up until last week, our nation’s television stations were scheduled to stop airing analog broadcast on February 17th.  Consumers who receive television signals over the air or with an antenna will need a converter box or a digital television set to get broadcasts once the transition to digital is made.  The government has been planning this switch for years as going digital improves the quality of TV reception and frees up large amounts of airwaves for other services like wireless data.  To notify the nation of this all-digital transition the National Association of Broadcasters ran an ad campaign that has caused more confusion than clarity for consumers on whether or not they needed a converter box and how to hook them up.  In a classic example of not catering to your audience via an ad campaign, many of the spots encouraged consumers to check out the FAQs on www.DTVAnswers.com .  I’m sure it was this digitally-savvy audience’s first instinct to surf on over there…once they figured out how to get web access.

For those in need of a converter box the government also helped defray the cost of these boxes by entitling each US household to two $40 coupons.  Of course, the easiest way to get the coupons is to go to http://www.dtv2009.gov, but once these consumers get online it won’t do them much good currently.  To date, there have been more than $1 billion worth of coupons issued and there are millions of Americans on the waiting list for coupons as, surprise, the program is currently out of money.  The current economic stimulus package working its way through Congress apparently contains funding for the coupons program and further preparation efforts.  The delay in getting approval may be needed because there is also a concern that the current stock of converters is set to sell out shortly and there will not be more converters in stores until sometime in April.

Now, Congress has delayed the transition until June 12, 2009.  Broadcasters can turn off analog signals before June 12th, but the station must first notify the FCC and viewers before Feb 9th.  More confusion, more scrambling as stations decide if they want to risk losing antenna-only households in their viewing area and risk a ratings decline or pay for two transmitters for the time being.

According to MRI, 17.7% of Americans live in households with only over-the-air TV.  As of this month, Nielsen reports that 5.8 million households are not ready for the transition.  Granted, we’ve known this was coming for ten years now, but for those Americans who have never sent an email or looked at a website, a properly executed awareness campaign was in order.  Instead they got a campaign that lacked a solid strategic core, mixed with improper funding and typical politics, that ended up leaving most more confused than informed.

It’s an all too familiar story for those in the agency world.  When times get tough and the economy sours the advertising and media line items in many clients budgets is often the first place they look for cuts.  The decision is tactical – reduced spending gives a quick boost to the corporate bottom line.  It’s unfortunate really because the short-term gain does not help them when the recovery begins and it can, in fact, hurt them.

Studies have consistently shown that market leaders are those who market their way through a recession while other companies try to save their way through a recession.  You have to consider the long-term effects because an advertising cut-back during a recession, even if it doesn’t impact a companies current sales, will reduce their brand awareness, weaken brand associations and ultimately lead to reduced sales.  As our own opinions@trone.com economy study shows the current propensity for consumers to change brands is high.

In a nutshell, here are five of the top reasons to hold strong and continue to advertise:

1. It’s a Buyer’s Market: You will find media bargains right now.  The current economy is impacting everybody, including media properties, so it’s a buyer’s market out there and there are plenty of deals to be had.
2. Keep Customers Informed: You need to keep consumers and prospects informed of your business.  Advertising is distributed information and a fundamental part of the business process.
3. Share of Voice: If your competition trims their ad budget you have a great opportunity to capture competitor’s customers.  By staying visible you have a much greater chance of being top-of-mind when those important purchase decisions are being made.   Conversely, if you trim your ad budget and your competitors hold, you risk becoming invisible in the marketplace.
4. Share of Market: The possibility of gaining share through advertising is greater when the market is soft.  When markets expand, share gains are harder to come by.
5. Position Your Brand as Stable: Staying visible in the marketplace maintains the image of stability.  In a chaotic environment many consumers become skittish and you need to maintain a positive, strong image.

Advertising needs to be viewed as an investment, not a cost.  Those that adopt this way of thinking will reap the rewards of their investment in the long run.  In the spirit of the new White House Chief of Staff, Rahm Emmanuel, “You don’t ever want a crisis to go to waste.”