Marketing used to be a lot simpler. In the mid-1960s, the three major television networks could still be counted on to deliver messages to the vast majority of consumers on a regular basis. Media strategy was as elemental as advertising Tide in the daytime and Pepto-Bismol during the evening news. Years before the invention of remote control (not to mention TiVo), people sat, watched and listened to each message. When they weren’t watching TV, consumers turned to a handful of broadly-targeted magazines that boasted huge circulations and delivered eyeballs in bulk to their advertisers. A largely uniform American population with limited media choices meant that a single campaign could serve a national brand from coast to coast.

This steady, homogeneous media environment made it relatively easy for a product to gain attention, especially with a limited number of competing consumer brands. Product launches had long lead times, reflecting painstaking mechanical production processes; in the pre-digital era, the race to market was a marathon, not a sprint.

Those days are long gone. In recent decades, the American market has undergone a profound transformation on several levels. Rising ethnic diversity and non-traditional households have fueled a proliferation of demographic profiles, each with distinct viewpoints, interests and priorities. The media channels that serve this population have proliferated as well: broad-based television and print models are giving way to an explosion of narrowcast cable channels and niche magazines, even as both of these media lose ground to newer forms of content and entertainment. Consumers now spend more hours online than reading print media, while the video game industry rivals Hollywood in economic activity.

This hotly competitive, short-attention-span marketplace calls for increasingly sophisticated marketing strategies and methods. No longer can marketers expect a single medium to deliver the vast majority of consumers; no longer can they expect a single message to resonate across a broad population. In the words of Larry Light, Global CMO of McDonald’s, “The days of mass media marketing are over.”

As companies strive to reach and address each of the constituencies they target, new priorities emerge. To get the right message to the right person at the right time, marketing organizations must achieve new levels of flexibility and responsiveness. Launches must be executed more quickly to hit fast-moving windows of opportunity. The cost of each campaign must be reduced to stretch marketing budgets across a greater number of activities.

Above all, brand control, always a key concern, has never been more important. With so many new companies and products coming to market every day, consumers turn instinctively to strong brands they know and trust. For established brands, this makes it essential to maintain consistency across an ever-widening spectrum of marketing activities worldwide—a damaged or fragmented brand can compromise the company’s most important competitive asset. For new entrants, the challenge is even greater: to speak with a single, clearly identifiable voice, even in addressing a diverse range of audiences, in hopes of building the next great brand.