By: Jeff Vidler, Senior VP & Managing Director, Radio for Vision Critical

If you’re a regular reader of Ad Age or Wired, you’ve probably come across Bob Garfield. A very funny writer, he makes for an entertaining read. But be forewarned: you need a taste for gallows humour. Bob’s outlook for the traditional media is both blunt and bleak.

Garfield’s new book, The Chaos Scenario, is getting a lot of attention. Mainly because he strives to shake loose any lingering denial the media industry might have about where things are headed. And, as often as not, he succeeds. Chapter One, “The Death of Everything,” sets the tone.

At its essence, the Chaos Scenario talks about what he considers the “decoupling” of mass media and mass marketing and suggests that the ensuing revolution is already underway. Bob sees three primary reasons for this:

1. The hyper-fragmentation of both traditional and digital media,
2. Ad avoidance on behalf of consumers, and
3. The nearly infinite supply of advertising inventory.

With more and more media options available to consumers on all platforms, it becomes increasingly difficult to build the kind of mass audience that advertisers are used to buying. As audiences and revenues decline, there is less money to produce high quality programming. We see this playing out at network TV networks, as reality shows and programs like Jay Leno represent a bigger and bigger slice of prime time TV. And in other media as well—radio stations add voice-tracking and daily newspapers struggle to maintain the size of their newsroom. The inevitable result is that audiences dip further and advertisers start looking for marketing alternatives.

Meanwhile, audiences are now able to sidestep advertising in more ways than ever. DVRs, pop-up blockers, VOD, Internet radio, and iPods are only a few of the digital media options that help the audience block or reduce irrelevant or annoying advertising—much like junk mail filters keep your email free of spam.

Finally, Garfield suggests that the virtually endless supply of online ad inventory is pushing down the price of advertising. It’s simply a matter of supply-and-demand—the more choices available to an advertiser, the less they are willing to pay. This in turn is having a particularly big impact on the ability of traditional media and others to monetize their online audience.

But, Bob, is the future really all that dark?

Even Garfield acknowledges that it’s not—at least in the short run. He thinks that there may even be a modest upturn in ad revenues when we come out of the current recession. Distribution advantages will keep the money flowing for a while. We can also find some solace in the fact that inertia will likely keep the system alive for a while longer: it’s simply too darn convenient for advertisers, agencies and the media to keep using the current mass marketing model.

Looking farther into the future, once the broken business model for advertising has sucked much of the quality content out of the ad-supported media, Garfield sees the opportunity to fund premium content through subscriptions (e.g., HBO) or micropayments.

Garfield also sees a future for marketing, if not the advertising model as we’ve come to know it. He calls it “Listenomics” and predicts that it will replace the hierarchal relationship between broadcasters and advertisers on one level and the audience on another. In a digital world where everyone is connected and everyone is a broadcaster, the winners will be those firms that do the best job of reversing the flow, and put their focus on listening to their customers. By using digital connectivity to their full advantage, organizations open the door to find and nurture brand evangelists among “the group formerly known as the audience” (as Garfield likes to call them). And that will hold whether you’re selling pizzas or media content.

If you’re interested in getting more of Bob Garfield’s take on media and marketing, his interviews and commentaries are all over the Web. He’s been particularly visible over the past couple of months while he’s been marketing his book (building his own brand evangelists, I suspect.) You may also want to go online for John Parikhal’s four-part interview with Garfield—John probes Bob for his specific thoughts on the present and future state of the broadcast industry (search “The Chaos Scenario” on www.gomediafix.com).

Jeff is a regular contributor to Broadcast Dialogue magazine. This column appears in the November 2009 issue.