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User Data is Key to Personalization

Making the most of digital broadband interactivity requires an understanding of new consumer behavior and preferences that already are challenging media's major players and much of the industry's conventional wisdom.

The traditional consumer demographics that have defined success in the television, film and print media businesses are but a starting point in a new era in which respecting the deeper data now available about user motivations, partiality and economics is imperative to making money.

Traditional media's transformation will depend more on companies' willingness to alter their attitude and use of more effusive consumer analytics than on the Internet properties they align with or buy. Unless media companies begin to heed the more sophisticated user data bank available, and place the interactive consumer first by understanding who they are, even the biggest are doomed to fail.

The power of this mind shift can't be overstated.

"The emerging media world is, after all, more about the consumer than it has ever been because interactive users -- not media companies -- now drive demand. It is increasingly about customized, individual products as well as differentiated content and services rather than the products championed by networks, studios, publishers or media titans, per se."

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