Shelly Palmer is a true television pioneer. He invented Enhanced Television, has weekly business news shows seen on public TV and online, writes a popular TV business news blog, and has even composed theme songs and award-winning music for many television shows. Palmer, managing director of NYC’s Advanced Media Ventures, is also an expert on how disruptive innovations and emerging platforms are revolutionizing media and entertainment. MiC caught up with him to get his read on where the mediaverse is headed, prior to his presentation at the second annual Media in Canada Forum: Getting to Engagement on October 3.

What new media channel is grossly under-exploited – and what are its opportunities? ‘The new techniques that are available through new advanced or emerging media offer different kinds of advertising capabilities that do not necessarily replace (old media) or need to be exploited more. What they need to be is incorporated into the media mix appropriately.

‘When does marginal gain exceed marginal cost of sorting out all of those opportunities? Really that’s everyone’s confusion. Should we be spending time and energy getting this kind of granularization, this kind of dynamism, this kind of addressability built into our advertising? Is it just cheaper or more efficient, even though there’s a lot of waste to use an older style or different style of marketing or advertising? That’s really what the question is – it’s not what do you use more, it’s how do you integrate and when.’

What is the biggest as-yet-unrealized impact of fragmentation and changing media consumption on marketers? ‘There’s going to come a time in the very near future where advertising to a million people who are watching one thing is an interesting way to spend your money, but you may need to be advertising to a million people who are watching 300,000 separate things. And you may need to aggregate and account for that level of fragmentation – and still need to use the technology to aggregate those results. That change is going to be profound.

‘Malcolm Gladwell calls it the tipping point. You can call it anything you want, but at some point that marginal cost, marginal gain is going to cross. Those two curves are going to cross each other and you’re not going to have a choice (but to make changes).’

What can marketers do about it? ‘Follow the trends and figure it out – and things will be revealed as you get enough data to make a deductive reasoned choice. People are dismissing it as not important, as opposed to understanding that we’re going into a complicated, very gray-shaded, subtle world where any individual thing may not be super-profitable but marginally profitable. So instead of buying one ad for $100 and seeing $500 come back, I may now have to buy 30 kinds of ads for $180 to make my $500 because the $100 spent in the old way is now only bringing in $300.

‘In crossing this point between marginal cost and marginal gain, you don’t get penalized for being late to the game. They love to say that pioneers are the ones with the arrows in their backs. You don’t necessarily need to be first in line to try something new. There’s no shame to being third when you’re trying something new in the advertising business.’

Bottom line? ‘This is not an uncomplicated time, or an uncomplicated issue. There are no fast sound-bite answers and I think that bothers people because we live in a sound-bite society. There is some learning to be had, experimentation to be done. You have to be hugely optimistic about the future and understand that the enemy is not the technology, the enemy is consumers getting control of things they never had control of before.

‘With consumers in control, at some point even brand managers are going to have to say – wow, there are 250 Web sites about my brand that I don’t have anything to do with. Maybe there really is a community of interest and maybe they know something about my product that I don’t know. Maybe I should be reading those fan sites, and maybe I should be reading those that are criticizing what I’m doing because consumers now control my brand more than I do. That’s not the world we’re coming into – it’s here now.’