It’s the Message and Not the Medium

Marshall McLuhan is momentarily famous for five words: “The medium is the message.”

With those few words, he got it wrong.

While he wasn’t specifically thinking about television – even a common light bulb is a medium – he wrote these words during the golden age of television. Television at the time was the most important medium.

Today, the most important medium, in my view, is digital or internet or social media. Some people call it new media. I think the word “new” gives too elementary a focus to what is merely an evolutionary process, probably an inevitable one.

No one can question the current and future impact of digital media. Sir Martin Sorrell reduced his giant conglomerate during the recent recession by nearly 14,000 employees, 12 per cent of the work force. Now he is ready to hire back – but only in the digital area.

However, digital will always be, I believe, an important supplementary medium. The reason for this should be obvious to anyone in the communications business for any length of time. The fact is, in terms of what we do, it is about the message – not the medium.

If the medium were so important, we would be communicating today by smoke signals.

My feeling is the communications disciplines are merging. The 30-second television spot, while still hanging on, is diminished in importance. The hum-drum news conference, still effective, has been splintered by more personal communications techniques.

Advertising and public relations, once kissing cousins, now find a convenience in marriage. At our company, we try to train people in both disciplines. If we don’t, the ad solution to a client problem might come form Mars and the PR solution Venus. When that happens, it is a disservice to the client.

The problem is the focus on delivery systems or platforms. The emphasis should be on the content, and that was secondary to Mr. McLuhan who felt the medium was paramount in the 20th Century.

McLuhan died in 1980. I think if he had somehow stuck around to the age of digital, he would realize the message will trump the medium every hour and day of the week.

After all, the influences of delivery platforms come and go. Messages can also change. They are ever involving. However, that is the point: Messages are fluid while delivery platforms are finite and static.

It could be, someday in the distant future, that messages are communicated by telepathy. The emphasis here – even if the pronouncements were by a latter day Galileo – would not be either on the means he used to communicate or even on the personality. It would be on what he had to say.

In other words, everything we do in any sphere of the communications business is about the effective delivery of messages. If that were not true, what relevance would we hold for our professions?

JMW