Denying consumer choice is akin to locking the doors of your business because you expect customers to arrive on YOUR schedule. Only the clueless would argue against the growing choice-driven marketplace.

Consider what’s about to happen in prime-time television. Will a program’s longevity one day be tied to paid viewings rather than estimated mass viewings? No doubt networks will not only know how many people are viewing, but WHO is viewing their product.

If an ad ran and no one saw it, would it still be an ad? It’s not a silly question. This is a new reality bulleting toward you: a consumer controlled marketplace means you can no longer force-feed your message to a pliant population. Like trees felled in a vast forest, advertising is increasingly falling unseen because advertisers ignore the reality of consumer choice.

Our challenge is to create marketing newly empowered consumers CHOOSE to see; compelling, relevant, genuine messages that set aside pretense and hype.

Don’t just open the doors, hand your customers the keys. Speak in their language. Give yourself over to their choices. This isn’t a fad. This is the new landscape.

Acceptance of my kids’ advanced sense of hip reminds me, life is like those moving sidewalks in the airport: walk or stand still, you’re being carried along–walking the wrong way will only keep you in one place.

My kids call me “so fifteen minutes ago” when I share my understanding of current hipness which they’ve long since digested or spit out. It’s all moving and we’re being carried somewhere…

So, if NOW is so fifteen minutes ago, what is still fifteen minutes AHEAD? Hang on to your carry-ons and grab the Advil, passengers: here comes IPTV.

Heralded as a Trojan Horse to the media fortress, this new technology is going to shake up changes in television we’re still coming to grips with now.

The Hollywood Reporter’s Diane Mermigas says, “Ready or not, dominant gatekeepers — from cable and satellite operators to telephone companies and television networks — are about to confront a new competitor: open-sourced, real-time, stored digital video on handy Internet-connected devices that play by a different set of rules.”

IPTV could do to TV what the Walkman and iPod did for/to music retailing: personalize and decentralize it. As they learned in Troy, walls of a city are more easily torn down from within. When consumers take control of content without regard to what will soon seem a narrow-band channel of distribution, choice will indeed go critical mass.

This end-run will put enormous pressure on your messaging: it has to be relevant, real and compelling. If you think the effectiveness of broadcasting is declining due to fragmentation now—wait fifteen minutes.