Traditional mass marketing tools and branding efforts address the audience as a single entity, regardless of how many people that might include. This approach offers no flexibility in speaking to individual members of a target market. It sends messages to large demographics based largely on assumptions made from the shows being watched. The investment firm Charles Schwab can take a calculated risk that they are more likely to reach people interested in their services by running their ads during The Suze Orman Show on CNBC than they would by advertising on The Real World on MTV.
While individual shows can provide a more narrow audience demographic, the message is still sent to the audience as a whole; the commercial has no way of reaching out to a particular member of the audience and saying, “Hi, John. We saw that you’ve been
looking around for tennis equipment lately. You might be interested in this brand.” Because of social media tools, the Web has the ability to speak to each member of a given audience on an individual basis through personalization. Sites like Amazon.com have perfected the art of promotion based on intuitive, one-to-one marketing.The second screen shot shows how the site looks the second time I visited it—after doing some searching on the site. Even though these visits were only a few minutes apart, Amazon changed the products on its home page to reflect what it thinks I would be interested in based on my previous search and/or purchasing history.