What is digital and what is traditional?

If one thing shows how much the world has changed it is this.The UK's Five TV station is to start showing Sofia's Diary - a show that Bebo commissioned and shows on its website.
This sort of thing highlights the dissolving barriers between digital media and traditional. Marooned in Bali for a week I read the reports of Leeds vs Milwall on the Telegraph website, I listened to Gilles Peterson on the BBC site and I could have watched the Apprentice (after a bit of work on my firefox settings to thwart the IP restrictions).
In the classic sense that is all deemed as digital media. Yet essentially I was just accessing traditional media in a different way - and for an advertiser how much does that matter? Someone buying ads in the Telegraph wants to reach the audience that the Telegraph has aggregated - does it matter whether I read the paper or saw it on the website? The key issue is that the message can be delivered in a more impactful way - they could actually use a TV commercial to reach newspaper readers online.
This news from the US suggests everyone needs to rethink the definitions of media.

Comments

[Rachel Clarke]

I wonder if it will be as successful as Quarter Life on NBC in the US, which made the move from MySpace to tv during the writers' strike. It got cancelled after 1 episode because it only attracted 3.1m viewers. On the web - that's a massive hit. Not so much on US TV.

[Dr. Letitia Wright]

I think that most people are looking at creating a hybrid kind of advertising. You have to combine a few things to make sales happen

[Simon Andrews]

I read about Quarter Life but hadn't heard it got pulled. Audience size is still a differentiator - Gorilla gets 2.5 million views on You Tube which is obviously a success - but the same audience is just one spot on a TV plan...
And you're right about the hybrid - the future is about using the big audiences on TV to invite interaction on a digital platform - be that see part 2 of the ad, download our app, read our helpful guide etc.
Imagine if Cadbury ended the Gorilla spot with an invitation to see the outtakes on the web...