On Monday, the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and YuMe released a whitepaper entitled, “Digital Advertising Audiences: The New ‘Liquid Consumer’ Paradigm,” which taps into thought-leaders and industry pioneers for insights and guidance on navigating the new “liquid audiences” that discover content across a range of mediums, devices and platforms.

If you haven’t encountered the “liquid” concept before, check out Coca-Cola Content 2020 Part One and Coca-Cola Content 2020 Part Two. Uploaded on Aug 10, 2011, the descriptions of both videos say, “The media landscape is a very different beast today than it was even 5 years ago. Then agency-led television commercials dominated how we channel our marketing. The very fact you are reading this here proves that things have changed.”

The descriptions add, “Coca-Cola have always been at the forefront of innovation. In this video Jonathan Mildenhall, Vice-President, Global Advertising Strategy and Creative Excellence at The Coca-Cola Company is the person responsible for leading global creative vision and strategy for the Company’s portfolio of global brands.

In these videos he explains how Coke will leverage the opportunities in the new media landscape and transform one-way storytelling into dynamic storytelling hoping to add value and significance to peoples’ lives.

Jonathan describes the challenge of content creation in an enlightening way, reminding us that ‘every contact point with a customer should tell an emotional story’.”

The IAB and YuMe white paper builds on the “liquid” concept. Produced in cooperation with the IAB Agency Advisory Board, the report demonstrates that the need to reach the “liquid consumer” has strong and specific implications for the creation, organization, distribution, and measurement of content.

The report highlights key ways that “liquid audiences” should impact content and marketing strategies. Among them:

• Definitions of “audience” must evolve – currently-used gender/age definitions no longer suffice
• “Social” and “mobile” are unsurprisingly crucial, but both embrace a wide array of meaning and nuance, which marketers must unpack to build successful strategies
• Understanding how someone navigates to content can be critical to connecting with that consumer
• The industry’s fixation on KPIs and standard metrics can distract from the more important goal of building fan-bases
• The line between “marketing” and “content” continues to fade – it’s all storytelling

These valuable and practical findings from the paper will come to life during an on-stage session at the Cannes Lions Festival Creativity on June 24 at 3pm CET, when Randall Rothenberg, President and CEO, IAB, delves into the need for “liquid creativity” with Danielle Lee, Vice President, Commercial Marketing, Vevo, and Athan Stephanopoulos, Senior Vice President, Strategy and Partnerships, NowThisNews.

“The digital media and marketing industry is in the business of reaching audiences anywhere, anytime and any place,” says Rothenberg. “It is critical to have a deep understanding of how the ‘liquid consumer’ behaves in order to reach that audience effectively. I am excited to talk to Danielle Lee of Vevo and Athan Stephanopoulos of NowThisNews to see how they are rising to the challenges.”

“Audiences are taking various routes to get to the content they crave,” says Anna Bager, Senior Vice President, Mobile and Video, and General Manager of the IAB Digital Video and Mobile Marketing Centers of Excellence. “The media landscape has evolved into an incredibly complex ecosystem, with roads and paths that are hard to map – making it almost impossible to pin down today’s consumer.”

“Content – whether created by a publisher or a brand – is at the heart of the digital media industry,” says Stephanie Gaines, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at YuMe. “And audiences are finding new and exciting ways to consume the content they love. With so much data now at our disposal, it’s up to us to deliver it in nuanced, innovative ways that suit the contexts and the circumstances that audiences have come to expect, and this report is an important step in the right direction.”