Chris Anderson has witnessed the digital revolution firsthand. As editor-in-chief of WIRED Magazine and author of The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (Hyperion, 2006), Anderson has a unique perspective on how the Internet revolution is forcing marketers to rethink how they get their message out. Sure, the new media afford new opportunities, but they also create new challenges for marketers. The secret to success, says Anderson, is all about being genuine – and in figuring out how your customers are different, not alike.

There was an article in WIRED last year on “mega-niches” – the idea that, with so many people online, even a tiny slice of a niche interest represents millions of people. How can marketers effectively target those online niches?

The reality is that consumers have always been very diverse in their tastes, but the traditional forms of marketing couldn’t accommodate that. We didn’t have a way to get exactly the right product to exactly the right people. The items on the shelves of most mega-stores are predicated on the notion that one size fits all. But the Internet is all about “niche-ification.”

Specifying niches to target the right consumer

The key is to explore the differences among consumers rather than the commonalities. As for how to market to them, just look at Google’s AdSense and AdWords programs: The entire success of those models is in their ability to specify niches. They have the ability to match a very specific ad to a very specific piece of content, so you have a higher probability of targeting the right consumer.

The big thing for marketers right now is how to take the powerful medium of video advertising and evolve that model so that it works in the very niche-centric medium of the Internet. Google’s purchase of YouTube is a $1.65 billion experiment in seeing whether that’s possible. With text, it’s easy – you can make an infinite number of text ads because they’re easy to create, and then there’s an infinite number of pages on which to match them.

While you have the possibility of creating an infinite number of different targeted ads with text, it’s not obvious how you can do this with video. But if you can, then that shifts the television advertising model to the Web-video advertising model.