In the early '80s, television was simple to plan and buy with just three networks to consider. Then came cable, then a fourth network called FOX, followed by a dizzying array of syndicated offerings and yet more new network entries:

Paramount and the WB. New choices continued to fragment traditional television viewing and advertising budgets.

Television's recent history has demonstrated that media budgets ultimately are pragmatic. As audiences migrate, media plans follow, acknowledging that the ultimate goal of any brand is to reach its target audience effectively and efficiently.

The exploding media landscape of the 90s-driven by increased TV audience fragmentation and the Web's popularity-have put this process into overdrive.

Like the 80s and early 90s, media planners are, again, adapting their plans to account for the ever-growing numbers of people spending increasing amounts of time online at the expense of other media.

The first evidence of this audience migration appeared in the Forrester Research report. The researchers asked PC users which activities they were giving up to spend more time on their computers.

And, while 24% did admit giving up eating or sleeping to pound away on the PC, the activity sacrificed by over three-quarters of the respondents was television.

Shortly after the Forrester findings were published, a study from The Georgia Institute of Technology's Graphic, Visualization and Usability Center (GVU) was released. This study, conducted on the Internet, asked users about their television viewing habits and what impact the Net might have on them.

Their findings indicated a distinct shift in media habits with almost 37% of respondents claiming that they "use the Web instead of watching TV on a daily basis."

At the same time, MSNBC noted the fact that Nielsen's ratings sweeps found one million fewer U.S. households watching prime time television versus the same period last year.

Simultaneously, Nielsen and CommerceNet released their Internet study, reporting that the North American online audience had doubled in the past 18 months.

Clearly the conclusions of these two studies are far from coincidence. Taken alone, this migration of the television viewing audience to the Internet is particularly striking.

This data is made even more impressive by the fact that Internet users are remarkably upscale. So, not only are we witnessing a fundamental shift in media habits, the Internet audience represents that hard-to-reach, well-educated, high income population most coveted by marketers.

Fact:

The Net Is the Fastest Growing Medium in History!

Internet advertising began in 1994, when the first banner ads were sold (Hotwired, October 1994) and the first commercially available Web browser, Netscape Navigator 1.0, was released (November 1994).

In a recent study, Mary Meeker, Managing Director, Morgan Stanley, and her team of researchers closely examined the adoption rate of the Internet, contrasted to the three other major "new media" invented this century: radio, network television and cable TV.

As a common metric, they examined the number of years it took or will take for each media to reach 50 million U.S. users. With television, cable and radio included for historical context, the growth of the Net is nothing short of remarkable.

Meeker estimates the Internet captured 50 million users in just five years. It took TV 13 years and radio 38 years to reach this milestone!

Fact:

Internet Demographics Are a Marketer's Dream!

Every major research organization has studied the demographic composition of the Internet. While methodologies and approaches vary, the findings are consistent: