The audience’s fingerprints are everywhere.

The president of a local ad agency called  ZLR ignition,  asked the question in his blog  How many ways do you get information? He examined the  sources of information a  typical business executive might be exposed too.  The premise was a twist on the old notion of how we are bombarded by thousands of messages every day.  Mr. Laurent suggests that succeeding with mass media audiences was no longer the challenge. Instead managing an audience’s fingerprint on all of the channels available was the bigger challenge.

He’s right of course,  as marketers  back in-the-day, we worried about cutting through the clutter to build top of the mind awareness with a target audiences by using various mass media outlets to efficiently deliver message impressions.

While we still worry about top- of- the mind awareness, we are no longer slaves to the audiences mass media delivers as conduits for our information. We now worry about how many different channels or sources our audience uses to receive information.

I thought it was an interesting exercise to examine a snap shot of how our family and friends receive information and interact with each other to illustrate just how much audience patterns have changed and provide some insight into what exists for the audiences to whom we are trying to reach.

A typical day in our house:

Morning Routine:
1. Read the morning newspaper’s web site over on lap top with coffee while listening to and occasionally watching early morning local news on television in the background.
2. Wife watches early morning local news on television and will read newspaper’s web site when she get to the office a few minutes early.
3. College age son: checks phone for texts that came in overnight, reads headlines on-line checks from various news aggregator’s, social networks – Facebook and email.
4. High school age sons – listens to weather on television, checks phone for messages, and computer for email.

Driving to work and school
1. Local radio – oldies, classic rock, NPR, local spots talk for us while other friends depend on satellite radio choices and mp3 players for those under 25.
2. Friends are checking email on phone while driving, also, Twitter and weather.
3. Passengers – texting while in transit

Work / School Routine:
1.  Arrive at work, check email. Like Mr. Laurent, I too scan Google alerts about clients, industries, social network marketing. RSS feeds from favorite bloggers I read. Visit sites that the alerts have flagged. Check news aggregator sites like Bloomberg.com, ESPN, CNN, Fox.  I also listen to CNN Radio on the web,  Imus in the Morning or NPR morning edition.
2. Check Facebook, LinkedIn pages, and anyother  message boards I like to follow.
3. Scan iGoogle pages for RSS feed updates through out the day.
4. Access Google Analytics to check mine and client web metrics.
5. Check regular mail and scan trade publications for other industry news.
6. Check email, Twitter and Facebook from phone during meetings throughout day.

Evening at home routine:
1. Watch local television news
2. Read books and watch a few good television shows, movies, and sports
3. Under 25 crowd – text messages, and cruises social networking sites while adding music and videos to MP3 players and phones

In the morning we will attempt to follow twenty five or more channels of information again. If the marketers are lucky our choices will remain predictable. But more than likely we will in our efforts to stay informed stumble upon other interests and information…. and our fingerprints will spread.