Variety, an old-guard magazine of the entertainment industry, released a study in late March this year addressing the widening gap between how the young and the old watch television. To scrape the title of the article, younger viewers (millennials and post-millennials) watch 2.5 times more internet video (including YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, Vimeo and so on) than traditional TV. And with so many more options available today, the viewing landscape is becoming increasingly fragmented and intimidating to companies looking to advertise.

Internet streaming is the future of television, though; there’s no way around it. Right now we’re in the transitionary phase as our stalwart elders decline in both numbers and overall spending power while the younger generations – those acclimatized since birth to look first to the World Wide Web for visual content – continue to proliferate. The question is: how will your hotel adapt to grow advocacy and future loyalty amongst today’s youth?

Your gut reaction should be for you to consider advertising on YouTube, Facebook and other social or video-sharing channels. And you’re not wrong! Traditional broadcast casts a wide swath across many disparate demographics – many of which may not necessary be your target – and commands a hefty upfront fee. Internet advertising is becoming increasingly specialized, allowing you to reach many individual market fragments, and then aggregate them together for a meaningful reach.

Despite what picture this paints, make no mistake: broadcast works…but it is also pricy. Internet advertising can be undertaken on a massive scale by the flags, but it can also be executed by independents and small chains. The key for the latter is to know thy prime demo.

For instance, let’s say you are the DoSM at a Southern Californian resort and the data shows that the majority of your past revenue is coming from families living within driving range. Many of these digital channels would let you pinpoint the territories where your guests live, target only mothers and fathers aged 35 to 65, and with a few other qualifying interests. Now you have to take into account the customer pathway of purchase of this prime demo and make minor adjustments for each of these streaming channels based upon differentiated viewing habits.

When executed smartly and with enough frequency, aggregating all these fragmented channels together gives you a reach that can equal what’s achieved by broadcast with what is arguably a better target penetration. One other point: internet advertising is largely incremental or pay-as-you-go, like Google Adwords. This can serve a definite advantage for independents who lack the upfront cash flow to fund a television campaign.

The next big inference from this ‘2.5 times’ statistic pertains to onsite or internal adaptations. That is, short videos designed to explain aspects of your hotel while guests are on property, or even video libraries accessible from your website (or dedicated YouTube channel) to fill a similar role. The bottom line here is to go where your audience is. If they expect information to be available to them via streaming services, then that is where you must be.

The third and final implication I draw from this Variety study is something that I’ve long advocated to the point of exhaustion. Content is king. You can advertise on broadcast or you can market digitally; either way, you must have a catchy idea to hook your customers. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that great advertisements are timeless, the best ones are always tuned in to what excites and motivates current audiences.

A great marketer of yesterday, Marshall McLuhan, instructed that the medium is the message. Now that we are witnessing the deconstruction of all 20^th century mediums, it’s fair to say that the medium is no longer the message; the message is (and has always been) the message.

(Article by Larry Mogelonsky, published by HotelsMag on May 6, 2016).