[By Jason Xenopoulos]

If your ad plays on TV, but there is no one sitting on the sofa to see it, did it actually play? This twist on the age-old philosophical riddle calls into question the validity of “reach” as a metric in the post-interruption marketing era.

Judging the effectiveness of a campaign based on reach assumes that when someone drives past your billboard or sees your ad in a magazine, they actually take notice of it. Unfortunately, in today’s information overloaded society we have become proficient at filtering marketing messages.

People point to the personal video recorder (PVR) as the death of the 30-second TV spot, but we have had PVRs built into our brains for the past decade. How many of you channel-flash during ad breaks, or go to the kitchen to make a cup of coffee? How many of you don’t even register most of the billboards you drive past? If we were to take note of every marketing message that entered our peripheral vision on a daily basis, we’d have a neural meltdown, so we’ve learned to tune them out.

The days of interrupting people while they are being entertained in order to blast out your marketing messages are over. Today, we need to “engage” with audiences in order to ensure that they are taking note of our brand.

This new reality is leading marketers to focus on “engagement” as the key metric instead of “reach” when measuring the efficacy of their campaigns. This new focus, on a deeper, more resonant interaction between consumer and brand, is one of the many elements driving the explosion of digital marketing in the developed world.

Digital media, when used correctly, has the ability to engage with consumers far more effectively than traditional media. This is due to several factors, including the interactive nature of digital, the targeted nature of the medium, the social nature of it and its inherent ability to measure engagement and not just reach.

When someone drives past your billboard, it is impossible to tell whether or not they took any notice. The same is not true with a banner ad or a section of your website, or a content snippet on your blog or Facebook page. Online analytics tools allow digital marketers to tell exactly which pieces of a digital campaign were noticed and what consumer reactions they triggered.

But in the post-interruption age, it is not only the measurement tools of media that are changing. The entire definition of what constitutes media has to be reconsidered.

Traditionally, media was a fixed target. Advertisers who wanted to communicate a message would buy media space — on TV or radio, in magazines and newspapers or on some form of out-of-home media. Agencies could be highly creative about how they used this 30-second spot or that double-page spread, but the actual media space was relatively fixed. In digital, while there are some preexisting media outlets, it is much easier to create your own media, to engineer your own context … and brands are doing it every day.

This has led to an elevated importance in the area of “owned media”.

The concept of “owned media” is not new. Food retailers have been selling their Gondola Ends to suppliers for decades; companies have been erecting billboards on the side of their buildings or advertising in their loyalty club magazines. But digital, with its ability to quickly and easily spawn new media platforms, has radically increased the scope and reach of “owned media”.

Consider Nike’s Nike+ Running Community. By offering runners the ability to upload data about their runs, to track their progress and to share and compare that data with others in the community, they have created a value-added brand platform that no amount of media spend could ever buy.

But the biggest changes to the media landscape have not arisen as a result of the Internet in general, but as a result of social media in particular. Before the rise of Facebook and Twitter, a common Internet buzzword was “sticky”. Marketers were constantly looking for ways to keep audiences engaged with their digital properties for longer by creating stickiness around their offering. But recently a new buzzword has emerged: “slippery”.

On the social Web, it isn’t so much about getting people to stick to your property as it is about creating “slippery” ideas and “liquid” content that can travel quickly between users. This phenomenal power of digital “word of mouth” has given rise to the notion of “earned media”. Online marketers understand that by injecting truly contagious ideas into the ether, by providing talkability, they can earn the attention and interest of consumers. And this opt-in approach to spreading one’s message is the most powerful means of communicating.

For years, I have heard traditional marketers refer to digital as just another channel. In the past this may have been accurate. Back in the nineties, when the web was still a publish-and-browse medium, in many ways digital was just another channel. But with the advent of social media, the Web has shifted from being a publish-and-browse medium to becoming a blackboard on which everyone is invited to make their mark. In this inherently social context, digital is no longer just another channel. It represents a fundamental shift in the dynamic between consumers and brands.

On the social Web, consumers are all powerful. For years, consumers have been armed with tools to obliterate our marketing messages — from the remote control and the PVR to the computer mouse. As a result, smart marketers realised that the best way to avoid having their brands “PVR’d” or mouse-clicked into oblivion was to build those brands into the fabric of the entertainment that customers chose to consume. This led to a rise in branded entertainment and “utilitainment” platforms like Nike+. But today, on the social Web, consumers don’t just have the ability to silence your brand messages, they have the ability to create and disseminate their own messages.

And if we play our cards right, our brands can earn the privilege of becoming part of those priceless consumer conversations.

So, while the traditional “bought media” paradigm remains an important tool for marketers, “owned” media and “earned” media are becoming increasingly important aspects of the new media landscape, a landscape in which the quest for “reach” is rapidly giving way to the need for “engagement”.