NEW YORK, NY – Last month I spoke to the efficacy of targeting quad-force of right-person, right-place, right-time and right-content. This sparked some debate (and some confusion) with colleagues who saw my allusion to the effective targeting of video content as a form of distribution heresy.

"If you don't plant your content somewhere, how are users going to return to it, push it out to friends and family and find it via search?" a friend questioned me.

My position is that, in today's world of multichannel media consumption, you have to play to the habits of the empowered user and find the user through targeted, decentralized video distribution versus pushing them to view site-locked content.

Capturing your audience's attention is an art and a science, and with new technologies popping up all the time which further give users the ability to customize their Web experience, marketers are at battle with constantly evolving user habits. These things are understood in the context of a cluttered and fragmented marketplace, so why employ old strategies of promoting content with content, and pushing people to a headquartered destination?

Rather than hoping users will return to a destination, you can retarget them once they've shown an interest in the content.

Rather than require new users to grab content from one place, distributed content can be shared right from the players they're being distributed in.

Rather than rely on search alone and click action to bring the audience to the mount, the mount is brought to the audience.

I'm not saying anyone should exclude having an anchor site for their content, only that content itself is a powerful and deliverable tool, and should be dispersed to as many places as possible where the target audiences visits.

Where many seem to frame this as an argument of "marketers finding the audiences vs. the audience finding the marketer," I see it as more of a new paradigm where "the marketer has to make it as easy and strategically sound for their users and their content to meet."

This approach, of distributing content to a growing number of sites and targeting/retargeting relevant users, ensures a marketer's relevant content is being viewed by the right people, at the right time, in the right places.

Copyright 2009 MediaPost Communications. All rights reserved. From http://www.mediapost.com. By Chris Young.
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