The message is the message
1964. A cinema ticket costs around € 0.25, The Beatles occupy the entire top five in the US Billboard Top 40, Cassius Clay knocks out Sonny Liston, Nelson Mandela gets sent to Robben Island and the British and French announce to build a Canal tunnel.
Also, Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan launched his famous catchphrase “the medium is the message”. McLuhan wasn’t exactly Mr. Average; he’s the same guy from ‘the global village’ -concept, the phenomenon that the world is becoming more and more interconnected as a result of increasing media technologies. Remember, it’s the early sixties… And from that theory he conjectured the internet, some sloppy thirty year before its actual institution. In communication circles, MM is considered a visionary à la Cruijff. His ‘the medium is the message’ still is the main pillar on which various mass media theories are built.
With his theory, McLuhan introduced that the medium is in fact more important than the message or the content of the message. From a philosophical point of view (let’s get a bit technical here), he saw ‘information channels’ (and you really should see that as broadly as you can imagine) as an extension of the human senses, that affects both the individual and society. The nature of the medium, in this way, in turn becomes a different message. Hence: the medium is the message.
Because his theory was so sibylline, multi-layered, and most of all, for that era, so aberrant, for decades communication students grew up with MM’s dogma that was forced upon them with a dédain that only met its equal in the relativity theory.
McLuhan introduced that the medium is in fact more important than the message or the content of the message. The nature of the medium, becomes a different message. Hence: the medium is the message.
And yet, in the tittle above, WE crossed out ‘the medium’. And replaced it by ‘the message’. Hence: ‘the message is the message’. We don’t just put on a play because we think MM’s theory is rubbish. However, the pendulum went a bit out of balance.
So, the message is the message. With the advent of the internet, social media and the craziest possible digital applications, McLuhan’s theory became even more endorsed. Not necessarily supported by the most rational arguments regarding the newest media (some loose paraphrasing is not very uncommon in communications midst’s). “You have to adjust your message to the type of medium you use!”, the purists like to shout. In other words, you cannot communicate the same message in a 140 character tweet as in a radio spot, or an internal memo. “Mobilizing for a revolution through a tweet. Ah no sir, that is not going to happen.”
With the advent of the internet, social media and the craziest possible digital applications, McLuhan’s theory became even more endorsed.
Bullshit! It goes without saying that your story (the context, the playing field) is different for each medium. But if one factor has to be the same, always, then it is your MESSAGE. Your message, that’s your DNA. Your core. And how you package that, that’s your story. Maybe you like to dye your hair, wear fake nails or walk around with a navel piercing. That won’t change who you really are.
It will alter the perception of who you are, though. And in communication, the perception is even more important than the message itself. That’s why you better put some energy into your message. So that perception won’t undermine your message. That’s where message development kicks in. This is a craftsmanship you can safely compare with the European hornet nowadays. It’s a dying breed. Because translating difficult content into comprehensible bite-sized chunks is not for everyone.
Message development is the art of sculpting a message from a rough block, after a lot of cutting, notching and scraping, which, through the choice of the right words and an appropriate rhythm, arrives directly and undivided at every stakeholder. Thinking you are a good copywriter, or if you are usually the chosen one within the family to write down the sonnets in honor of Aunt Julia, does not make you a message developer. Let alone that you excel in it. You must not only be able to write well. You have to be able to integrate strategy into it from the most Machiavellistic point of view.
But if one factor has to be the same, always, then it is your message. Your message, that’s your DNA. Your core. And how you package that, that’s your story.
Now, because the medium does have an impact on both the construction (e.g. the solely 140 characters of twitter) and the perception of the message, you will have to adjust your message formally to your medium. Formally so, and not substantively.
And that is the heart of the matter. Message development starts with a key message, your core. One central message, which you infuse with a few sub-messages (to explicit and frame your core message). And if you do this smoothly, you’ll have a variety of ammunition that will take any of McLuhan’s media out of the air.
By bringing your message in a coherent way, regardless of the medium, you will set something in motion that has gained in importance through the new media technologies, namely REPETITION. We are almost at ten now. That’s the number of times a human brain has to process a message before it sticks. The trick is to get your message to your target group as often as possible. And if “every disadvantage has an advantage”, then the fact that you have to formally adapt your message to your medium, is just a blessing! This way, your stakeholder doesn’t even notice that you’re besieging him/her with the same message.
By bringing your message in a coherent way, regardless of the medium, you will set something in motion that has gained importance through the new media technologies, namely repetition.
So, make sure that you, as a company, have a clear and well-considered strategic vision and mission. Then get your message development started. Translate your story into messages, slogans, tag lines, sentence structures for people managers, scripts for the reception to answer the telephone, boiler plates etc. Be consistent. Be so freaky consistent that you start wandering about your mental health. Because consistent is cool. Consistent = success.