One of the things I noticed when I first moved to Vietnam was the abundance of TV sets. Every home seems to have one and mostly it’s on all day. Even offices and work places tend to have the flickering screen supervising all life.
It was quite a surprise because I had been thinking in recent years that the days of the TV would be over and that the internet would take over the entertainment portfolio in our lives. It certainly had done that in my life.
An interesting article in Time as part of the 10 Ideas for the Next 10 Years series discusses the TV and its spread. The article points to the significant growth in the spread of television and the access people have to it in underdeveloped countries.
Far from showing a demise of the media it appears to be finding a veritable renaissance in the world. Citizens of Asian countries are grabbing this powerful communications tool with both hands.
One point the article was making was that TV would assist the spread of greater access to human rights by people previously disadvantages. In particular women would benefit from exposure to programmes showing women with greater rights in other parts of the world.
This exposure has already shown some results. It has been noted that women in rural areas in India for instance who have access to cable TV have become emboldened to become more independent by doing things such as going to the market on their own.
Does this have anything to do with marketing you might wonder. Well the concept of the demise of TV does, the greater independence of women not so much for the point I’m trying to make! I just added that because it’s such good news…
The significance of it is that one can get entrenched in a point of view such as the demise of TV because one is focused on one tiny small market segment of the target audience.
Just because I and many computer geek friends use computers as the primary entertainment tool does not mean that the rest of the market or the rest of the world does as well.
When examining your market, or observing a new trend, keep your eye on your immediate market but do not ignore the bigger picture. You could find that you miss the point totally because your view is too narrow and limited by your immediate environment.
When checking your market it’s easy to think that you and your circle of acquaintances are the global market. It’s most probably not so!
on Mar 25th, 2010 at 4:56 am
Yup - some very interesting things happening in the TV space and there is definately some overlap between content served over the internet and what you are seeing on TV.
It’s funny - last year radio made a huge comeback from a media (journalist) perspective with a number of South African journos expressing an interest in moving from writing to presenting a radio show. Things like podcasting has made this whole segment far more accessible.
The more things change, the more they stay the same?
on Mar 25th, 2010 at 5:09 am
Isn’t it just! Great to see radio make a come-back. It’s called listening to the customer and finding out what they want. Something the newspapers haven’t done in a while, hence their struggle.