Issue #1

The Message is the Message

"The medium is the message," -- Marshall McLuhan.

By Michael Willard

The field of advertising continues to be in a state of denial, worshiping at the altar of what was once considered creative and cool, but today is considered simply clutter and cacophony.

What's more, television is dying. It is no longer the media platform of choice of the sophisticated marketer, and this has confused an entire tribe of East European creative directors. They grew up thinking that advertising was about making 30-second movies.
Intentionally or not, they let the medium swamp the message. They introduced cute or even shocking video bites, and the visual blast overpowered a message that called for simplicity and emotional connection.

Hence, there has been the tendency in Eastern European advertising to offer up the tried and what use to be the true, partly because that is what agencies know best, but more to gratify creative egos at the expense of a client's product.

Without a doubt, today's communications challenge hinges on how to best reach stratified audiences. Demographics are becoming less homogenized. No longer is the family clan sitting down in the evening together to watch a favorite program. They scatter in multiple directions, each availing himself of the media platform that suits the current purpose. Chances are it is not the television.
I have often written that the advertiser or the PR marketer has to tap the consumer on the shoulder, turn him around, and metaphorically shake his hand. But more than that, a friendly hug is needed.

This challenge of which I write doesn't call for traditional advertising or traditional public relations. It does call for a married and genetically modified version of both. It calls for a personal brand of communication that moves to action rather than annoys or even entertains.

At the same time, this communication must have honesty as its common denominator, as well as that oft-used word, transparency. It can't be about forming phony front organizations or enlisting viral communication so fictionally scripted as to have fooling the consumer its main objective. These techniques, never good, have already contaminated the chow mix of new communications techniques.
So, how do you reach the consumer in the 21st century?

First, shred yourself of that which worked well up until the 1990s and even beyond in some countries: those little 30- or even 60-second spots that advertising agencies so like to make and show off at award ceremonies.
Of course, you will have to convince the global marketer for Colgate, P&G, Kraft and a host of others that the battle is not over gross rating points but over winning hearts and minds. That which floats loftily above rarely makes a personal connection. This seems as obvious as rainwater, but for some reason there seems a conspiracy to stick with the moldy oldie.

Secondly, think locally. The late Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, Tip O'Neill, said that all politics are local. He should have moonlighted as a futuristic ad or PR guy. But don't think in terms of widely segmented groups such as "soccer moms", or "teenagers with acne", but more in terms of attitudes and emotional buttons. In other words, moms who would do anything for their children and teenagers whose greatest fear is being considered unattractive by the opposite sex. These are messages not easily lassoed under narrower segments but they are sufficiently localized to deliver specific messages to specific audiences.

Thirdly, throw out the old axiom that there is nothing new under the sun. There is, or else inventors wouldn't invent and in a computer world, books wouldn't be having an all-time resurgence. But keep it simple.

Marshall McLuhan, the oft-referenced communications expert, has as his epitaph writ large: "The medium is the message." It is his most famous pronouncement, or at least the most quoted. But that was a half century ago. I think today the message is the message, and the quicker advertisers and marketers realize this, the sooner our profession will become more relevant to the consumer.