The evolution of ‘destination’ media

In the old days, your online experience revolved around a search engine, a browser, and a bunch of bookmarks you saved for your favourite websites. You clicked around them, “surfing the web” and finding your way by clicking on content.

In that world, content was king, and it was delivered on destination websites.

Then things changed.

Website destination

Along came Google Search, changing how platforms like Yahoo, Excite, Infoseek and Alta Vista delivered content for you to visit. Directories were massive. Google perfected search, and in the end, it became the primary way that people discovered information. Content was still king, and it was still about the website destination.

Then things changed again.

The third wave was about feeds: News feeds. Social feeds. Aggregators that gathered the best information from all those sites you used to bookmark, and extracted what you wanted, amassing it all together so you could just save that one destination, or download that one app.

You could discover all your favourite content in one place and then go visit. Content was king, and mobile apps became the destination.

Along came AI

Then things changed one more time.

Along came AI. Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT have quickly supplanted search and clicking on blue links.  At the same time, mobile has supplanted the desktop for most people, and the primary way people are now spending time online is between AI and video on their devices.

Those social feeds and news feeds still exist, but they are mostly found inside social media and they are intertwined with short-form video. Social media and social feeds are dominated by video.

Content is king, but the only real destination is an app. Websites are less important, just serving to feed the AI.

And that is where we are today. If you want to reach an audience through media, you reach them by inserting into social feeds, inserting into video and making sure you have enough information out there that you can be inserted into the AI responses, and hopefully represented accurately.

It’s all about insertion into the flow of the web, capturing attention and delivering awareness, consideration and intent. It’s about intercepting the journey, and less about the destination.

This is the landscape today, and it’s never going back.

Content is still king

The interesting fact is that content is still king. Regardless of the result from AI, the apps on mobile or the videos you watch and the feeds you scroll, great content wins. The difference is that the destination for the content is less important than how it’s distributed.

Brands like ESPN and Disney still have destinations they manage, but those are rarer than ever before.  It’s not about the destination and driving people to your site or app.

It’s about getting your content to the audience where they want it. It’s a distributed model more than a series of hubs, and AI will only perpetuate that.

This dramatically changes how advertisers should look at digital media. A good consumer-focused strategy should be about content, distribution and video. Even a B2B marketer should be focused on content, distribution and video.

Your site is still valuable for a few more years, but the syndication of content, and therefore your message, is far more important and valuable going forward.

It’s a push strategy, not a pull strategy. You push your message out to the audience, capturing them in the flow, and you strive less to pull them into your owned destinations. This has ramifications across all your go-to-market channels.

How are you responding to this evolution?