The company is the medium is the message
Posted on | October 5, 2007 | No Comments
This is a philosophy I’ve been pushing for some time now, but the McLuhan-derived mantra in the title above only came to me recently. McLuhan of course said “The medium is the message.”
In fact it’s even more enigmatic when you read the entire passage:
In a culture like ours, long accustomed to splitting and dividing all things as a means of control, it is sometimes a bit of a shock to be reminded that, in operational and practical fact, the medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium – that is, of any extension of ourselves – result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.
I’ve always taken the phrase in a precise way. Television, for instance, as a medium is an emotional message because it leverages images. We haven’t begun to come to grips with the consequences of the internet as a medium, but the understanding of a new medium takes years.
But it’s safe to say that at this point in marketing that the company, because the internet allows it to be a medium, is becoming the message.
I think it’s an important notion to contemplate. I frankly am not sure of the longterm consequences because I’m no prophet. But rather than communicate through gatekeepers, companies increasingly will be communicating one-to-one and, I think, becoming a much more dominant force than they already are in our culture. And that’s the message.
Another McLuhan quote, courtesy of Mark Federman, is this:
Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force.
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December 6th, 2007 @ 9:20 am
This is indeed where I see the discipline of marketing heading – it’s now clear that all of the traditional rules are either changing or being tested for change. Great content is now in the eye of the beholder – if it solves my problem, it’s great content no matter where it came from…even if it was on a companies website