Active Media: A framework for digital media effectiveness

This paper defines active media as a new paradigm that captures the richness of digital media in affecting every aspect of our lives. The term active media embraces interactive, coactive, and proactive digital media. Active media provide more dynamic and individualized experiences, and target recipients more accurately. Active media allow the integration of different human-centric systems into the era of system of systems. This new paradigm also overcomes the shortcomings of the existing paradigms for media consumption that still consider humans as information processors where media are considered as passive information objects processed by humans. However, media play more active roles in shaping our lives and in changing our behaviour and outlook, thus the process-oriented separation of passive objects and information processors is no longer valid when representing the interaction between media and humans. In this paper, e-marketing is used as an example of the application of active media. E-marketing environments are evolving into becoming more active and this could have a significant impact on the success of products and services. Applying the proposed framework on e-marketing communications will overcome the limitations of existing assessing methodologies by introducing a far wider and richer set of measures to describe, assess, and enhance the effectiveness of active media. The paper introduces an effectiveness framework based on a set of deliberate media effectiveness measures, and gives a sound rationale for choosing these measures. The introduced framework will help in accurately understanding, assessing, and enhancing the impact of active media on human-centred activities.