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Broadcast is dead. Long live the narrowcast.

Making TV commercials is a feat of terrible compromise. You have a great product with some great benefits and features – but airtime is too costly to talk about all of them, let alone that nobody wants to hear the entire laundry list anyways. So you gotta water it down: Who are the target customers for the advertisement, what message will – on average – resonate with them best, and how can you fit it into 30 seconds? Broad message + broad audience = broadcast.

Designing a message for the masses and their averages is bound to shut a lot of people out – those who don’t care about the product. Those who don’t care about the features you picked. But that’s part of advertising. Or was part of it.

Alright, so broadcast isn’t quite dead yet. There is plenty of TV to go around for a long time to come, but things are shifting noticeably. Viewership on Hulu is through the roof. Google’s Web TV is imminent. YouTube is transmitting live sports events, and even Microsoft Silverlight is sponsoring live streaming of Nascar races and some Olympic content.

Increasingly watching TV doesn’t involve the TV at all anymore.

Yet TV advertisements have– apart from gaining some color in 1954 – seen little change. Sure, advertisers have become smarter about placing them, identifying value propositions, increasing reach. But the basic premise is unchanged: one broad message, distributed shotgun to all viewers.

Does anyone really think it’s a great idea to show me an F150 Super cab commercial, when my IP address should make it obvious that I’m watching from downtown San Francisco? Is it really a great idea to have a show sponsored by a well-known feminine product, when I’ve clearly stated that my gender is “male”, when I registered on the site?

Sure, there is a slight chance that my wife is watching from my account. Or that I’m an avid pickup fan who just “happens to be” in S.F. at this moment. In all reality though, odds aren’t on the advertisers side here.

Even if you hit me up with a product I could care about – with all the CRM data companies have collected over the years, shouldn’t they know by know WHICH features I’d ACTUALLY care about?

Enter the possibilities of narrowcasting

Narrowcasting gives us the unique option to specifically cater to countless of atomic known audiences – one at a time. No longer do advertisers have to craft a broad message that appeals to the largest common denominator across what they expect the viewership of their message to be, but instead they can apply everything they know about each viewer, and put it to work to speak to each viewer with a unique voice!

It gets even better if you stop thinking about delivering the right speech for a product, and consider that many companies have more than one brand in the race. Watch some TV in the evening and take note how many ads are really from the same company, just a different division.

With narrowcasting there is a huge opportunity for marketers to think about budgeting across products and divisions in a whole new light. Just take a look how many different commercials a huge enterprise like Johnson&Johnson runs over the course of an hour: Acuvue. Listerine. Neutrogena. Carefree. Rogain.

And how much overlap is in the target audiences for these brands and products? What if you could automatically and instantly decide what is the “best” product to advertise to each individual viewer?

What products across your entire brand and product portfolio do you advertise to 45-year-old Females from New York? Out of those, what has the highest margin for you? What has the highest likelihood of being bought?

How would your product portfolio look, if spread out on a multi-dimensional graph. Do you really want to show the feminine products to all men? Even to all women? Would you tell every viewer about the same features? Or is there things you would tell blondes, brunettes, or red-heads differently if you’d know who’s watching?