The Medium is the Message

In the dim and distant past, when marketing dinosaurs were young….Oh yes! we were young too and just like the modern young marketers, faced the future with excitement, enthusiasm and complete confidence in our ability to face and solve any and all the problems our profession could and undoubtedly would throw at us. No one could foresee that the future would bring not just one, but two "Big Bangs". The first would change everyone's thinking, the second would stop everyone's thinking. The first is, of course, "The Internet," the second "The Recession." What would we have done differently if we had known they were coming..?

Just a minute that is not the subject I intended to write about this week. I had a much more personal thought to put to you, one about which I'd be very interested to know your thoughts.

At the time I referred to in my opening paragraph an American guru named Marshall MacLuan coined the phrase "The medium is the message." The statement was received on this side of the Atlantic with a degree of scepticism, not because it was inaccurate; it seemed to me at the time that it was because it's creator was an American and we hadn't thought of it first. The statement, though, found great resonance with me. It seemed entirely sensible to say that the same person should be treated differently when reading or watching different forms of media.

Let me put it you. When you are watching all dewy eyed, a romantic film on commercial television are you really in a mood to see an ad for road safety, or washing powders or for that matter any other form of work-a-day drudgery-related items? If you are reading one of the women's mags are you in the same mood to be sold to as when you read one of the red top newspapers? If you are interested in sport and are watching or reading a sports related article, products and services that are not involved with your thinking at that particular moment surely won't get the same attention. So the medium is the message? I thought so then and still do now.

At the time, the advertising world divided the population into groups defined by age, socio-economics, and location. Then they refined that further and all the interest was in deciding who read or watched what and when, and how much it would cost to reach each thousand of them. All sorts of new research developed from the sections of those basic groupings. I was naturally as interested in defining audiences as anyone else, but felt that not enough attention was being paid to the intrinsic differences in people as they went about their ordinary lives.

I mentioned as much to one of the top agency media directors of the time named Jack Rubins. He had a down to earth approach that I much admired, so I put this thought to him.
Imagine two families living next door to each other. Say that the men of each house worked in the same place, the docks maybe, doing the same jobs, and earning the same wage.
The first man smokes, races pigeons, drives a large but old car (A Ford Consul), goes for drink with his mates on a Friday night and takes his wife to the cinema on Saturdays. On Sunday he goes for a pint at the local while his wife gets the Sunday lunch ready. His children go to the local school and intend to leave at the first opportunity to go to work to earn some money….to do what dad does, and his dad before him. The weekly wage is always taken up by one form of entertainment or another; the family goes to Benidorm or somewhere like it, for their annual holiday.

Contrast that family with the other family. The second man doesn't drink or smoke, drives a small car (A Morris Minor) rarely goes out with his mates and spends most of his time at home with his family. He saves as much as he can from his wages and his wife goes out to work to earn a few extra pounds. His children are well dressed and go to the same school as the other family but are more studious and are working to get to further or higher education. Not for them the same work as their father, they intend to enter a profession and start a career rather than a job. The family sometimes goes on an annual holiday probably to Clacton or somewhere like that.

You can see that these two families are very different, yet the ‘Ad Men’ would mark them as C2's or D's and classify them as being the same. Of course that's all very different now, but that's how it was then. Jack Rubins, ever practical, agreed that the differences were important and that a programme of research was needed to describe the differences and try to quantify them. Encouraged by Jack's support I was able to convince The Mirror Group of Newspapers of the value of such a programme and they funded the research to bring into being the first National Income, Expenditure and Readership survey. It was a huge success. Even the editors of the newspapers found valuable information in it.

You may ask what the point of all this is? There's never been so much marketing knowledge as we have now, and I'm sure that's true. But I can't help thinking….if we know all about traditional media and The Medium really is The Message, what messages are the marketers getting from the Internet, what does all the new media tell the manufacturers about us all? Well in one relatively new area, the loyalty card, it tells them a great deal. In fact it tells them all about you and your family. That too has become a medium of communication. But the most interesting development is yet to come. It is now not expensive to own your very own website, think of all the things you could put on there. The time is coming when you will be the Medium and The Message.