What in the world do tectonics have to do with media? Tectonics refer to the movement of the plates that form the earth’s crust. We all know what happens when those plates move—the earth’s surface bends, rises, cracks, erupts and generally shakes things up.Just so, three great forces have shaped—and are currently re-forming—the varied terrain of today’s media landscape.

Fragmentation is hardly new. As far back as the early 1980s, new cable networks and magazine titles, many addressing narrowly-defined niche interests, altered the smooth landscape, creating fissures in the viewership to large broadcast networks and circulation of broader-based titles. There’s no reason to expect this phenomenon to go dormant anytime soon.In fact, it feels like it’s speeding up. A dramatic case in point: In 1950, there were 634 consumer magazines being published. In 2003? Just shy of 2,500—an average net increase of about 34 per year. In Q3 of 2006 alone, 47 new magazines debuted, including 14 titles targeting affluent readers, and nine for African-American audiences. And on the TV front: In 1950, households had an average of 2.9 TV channels available. In 2003? Almost 91.In the meantime, audiences have shrunk as choices have expanded. Just as with the plates forming the earth’s surface, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Customization has been a parallel movement. Fragmentation means consumers can customize their media choices to a far greater extent than ever before. Instead of being limited to a brief cooking segment on an early-morning show or recipes in Good Housekeeping, consumers can indulge their specific culinary interests via Food TV and Cooking Light. Or not just healthy cooking, but Vegetarian Times. Golf-aholics can watch all golf, all the time—not just on weekend afternoons when they’d rather be out actually playing golf.

Digitalization has magnified and accelerated both trends. Fragmentation and customization allow consumers to control the what (the content) and to a lesser extent the where and the when. As various forms of digital technology have matured, consumers can decide also the where, the when, and even the how. The time-starved and the dedicated multi-taskers among us have met this development with glee. The Internet provides content choices in numbers once thought unimaginable. Consumers can access more forms of content in more places (cars, airplanes, the beach, coffee houses) at more times (last night’s Desperate Housewives during lunch at their desks, or at 3 a.m.). And they can access content in more ways (streaming video, podcasting, cell phones). Video On Demand (VOD) is available in over 20% of TV households in the United States. And this barely scratches the surface.While we’re on the subject of digitalization: happy birthday to iPod—five years old, and already long the basis of verbs, adjectives, and new entertainment options.

A few features of this landscape:
Digital Video Recorders (DVRs, of which TiVo is the best-known example) are in roughly 16% of households, giving viewers the chance to watch what they want, when they want—and, for all intents and purposes, to avoid commercials. An hour program is now 46 minutes long. Recently they’ve been agitating the media landscape with heated debates over audience measurement—do TV networks get to include DVR audiences or not, as they price their ad time? The networks say “Yes!” Nearly everyone else says “No,” since most ads do in fact get zapped during replay and advertisers aren’t inclined to pay for audiences they definitively know are not there. But the issue is probably not dead. More fissures and eruptions may occur as we head into next year’s network “upfront” season.

Satellite radio, though still not profitable for suppliers XM and Sirius, has roughly 10 million subscribers. Subscribers living in Sacramento or Syracuse can listen to Cincinnati’s popular news-talk-sports station WLW via XM Channel 173 as easily as if they live in downtown Cincinnati. Music channels, in an enormous array of formats and sub-formats, are ad-free. However, all other channels— news, information, entertainment, sports—do carry ads.One of the most recent—and ballyhooed—entries onto the satellite radio scene is Oprah & Friends, on XM. This radio channel provides yet another way for fans to get a fix—and for advertisers to develop integrated marketing programs encompassing TV (Oprah), print (O, The Oprah Magazine), the Internet (Oprah.com) and now radio (Oprah & Friends). Imagine: All Oprah, all the time! If Oprah isn’t to your liking, Martha Stewart is just as ubiquitous.

Traditional newspapers continue to struggle to maintain readership (and thus ad revenue), while ad revenue for those same newspapers’ websites is growing rapidly. Some compelling statistics tell the story:

–The decline in audited circulation of daily and Sunday papers continues unabated. For each of the three or four most recent six-month measurement periods, daily circ has slipped 2% or more, and Sunday circ has declined more than that. No surprise: ad spending in print newspaper is barely holding its own.–In stark contrast, ad revenue for newspaper websites has seen at least eight consecutive quarters of double-digit growth—in some cases up as much as 40% versus the same period year ago.  

Not surprisingly, the greatest percentage increase in ad spending in the two years from 2003 to 2005, according to TNS Media Intelligence, has been on the Internet (up 36%). During the same period, outdoor advertising rose 32% (not coincidentally, as it becomes more digitalized and customizable), cable TV ad spending increased 27%, and Hispanic media gained 14%.

“Engagement” is the hot topic in the advertising industry, in part because of the recognition that merely counting eyeballs (or ears) is no longer an adequate way to measure audiences. While there’s not yet any broad agreement on the precise definition of “engagement,” most ad industry people believe they know it when they see it. Engagement is clearly related to the other key trends. The more a consumer participates in customizing her or his media content, the more likely she or he is to be fully engaged: “it’s my media.” Are there any better examples of this than YouTube or social networking sites like MySpace and FaceBook?But engagement is not solely driven or created by digital technology. Smart media brands are recognizing this trend by having consumers become part of the brand. A good example is the large percentage of reader-driven content in Cooking Light, which has gone well beyond the printed page to include branded Supper Clubs (which arose organically from enthusiastic readers after just one article in one issue), cruises, an Idea House, a rich website, even a restaurant. They talk with consumers, not just to them.A somewhat different example is the whole American Idol phenomenon. By design, the outcome is actually determined by consumers—and the most recent finale garnered 63 million votes. Viewers of Bravo’s Project Runway were encouraged to send instant messages to the show, which ran as a crawl across the bottom of the television screen. They got to vote for their favorite designer—who then received a prize totally separate from the final big one. In a perhaps more mundane arena, talk radio, where the listeners/callers literally are the programming, continues to be enormously popular.

So what does this mean for advertisers?P & G has it right: More than ever before, the consumer really is boss. Savvy marketers are seeking out and embracing consumers, on the consumers’ own terms. Digitalization makes the process more challenging but—importantly—also facilitates it. Flexible and nimble advertisers can survive the eruptions and tectonic shifts that continue to reshape the media landscape—they’ll embrace greater opportunities to more precisely target consumers, and build and nurture relationships with them, in ways unimagined only a few years ago.