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Choices: 2007, 2006, 2004, 2002 or 2001.

Answer is here, but read the article’s excerpts below and, after evaluating how far the media industry has come, see if you can guess:

1. Figuring out the right way to send the right message to the right person at the right time is difficult work. It is also risky, not unlike hunting game birds with a high-powered rifle instead of a shotgun. If you miss, you miss entirely …
2. Print, the oldest mass medium, has been “niching down” for decades but appears to be bumping up against the limits of its adaptability — at least when it comes to creating themed newspaper sections or demographically targeted editions of magazines.
3. “Monolithic blocks of eyeballs are gone,” declares Eric Schmitt of Forrester Research Inc. (FORR ). “In their place is a perpetually shifting mosaic of audience microsegments that forces marketers storytellers to play an endless game of audience hide-and-seek.”
4. However, the Internet is no panacea for storytellers micromarketers. The same technological advances that are fragmenting the mass audience also are empowering a new class of digitally savvy consumers who compile, edit, and otherwise customize the media they consume to their own personal requirements. “Companies must recognize that they increasingly have to engage gods and are not dealing with helpless consumers anymore,” says Rishad Tobaccowala, an executive vice-president of Starcom MediaVest Group (PUB ). “This is particularly true of young people.”
5. “It used to be that the mass magazines made all the money,” says Mary Berner, Fairchild’s president and CEO. “Now, it’s not size that counts most, but the ability to deliver someone elusive to advertisers.”
6. The rise of micromarketing targeted storytelling is as much a response to the fragmentation of consumer markets as to the fragmentation of the mass audience. In the 1950s and 1960s, the country was far more uniform in terms not only of ethnicity — the great Hispanic influx had not yet begun — but also of aspiration. The governing ideal was not merely to keep up with the Joneses, but to be the Joneses — to own the same model of car or dishwasher or lawn mover. As levels of affluence rose markedly in the 1970s and 1980s, status was redefined. “From the consumer point of view,” says McDonald’s Light, “we’ve had a change from ‘I want to be normal’ to ‘I want to be special.”‘ As companies competed to indulge this yearning, they began to elaborate mass production into mass customization.
7. “The future of marketing will be much more oriented to permission marketing — marketing plans and advertising so relevant that it is welcomed by consumers…” Stengel says.
8. The mass market will not disappear, nor will the mass media. But the fortunes of many of America’s best-known companies now will rise or fall depending on how well they adapt to what is shaping up as a long and chaotic transition from the fading age of mass marketing to the dawning era of micromarketing.