Over the last three weeks we have presented data on the direct influence of email and internet advertising on purchase by merchandise category: first, we looked at how a consumer's search engine preference influences acceptance of email advertising, then, we explored how search engine preference influences a consumer's general acceptance of internet advertising, and finally we looked at how search engine preference influences how a consumer plans for a new technology purchase.
The fact that these media channels influence each other is significant for advertisers.
At BIGresearch, our orientation to media recognizes that there has been a fundamental misunderstanding of how consumers use media. This misunderstanding is pervasive throughout both popular and academic accounts of media, including how people work with, think about, and make business decisions in marketing and advertising.
Most importantly for the people who read iMedia Connection, this communication model dominates the presumptions that most media planners and buyers have when they approach their work, as well as how ads are tested.
In other words, both the traditional and interactive ad industries are working with flawed mental models.
The most basic form of this media misunderstanding is a "transportation" model of communication, that is, a model in which the process of communication is simply a five-step transfer of information from one location to another:
SOURCE
TRANSMITTER
SIGNAL
RECEIVER
DESTINATION
Unfortunately, interactive media has made few advances on this model of communication.
Some quick academic background
These five steps in the communication process were distinguished by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver in "The Mathematical Theory of Communication" back in 1949. There have, of course, been other influential ways of schematizing the various aspects of communication. Harold Lasswell's formula "who says what to whom in what channel to what effect," for example. Also, Roman Jakobson's six factors of addressor, context, message, contact, code, addressee; and David Berlo's source, message, channel, receiver. Over the last few years in the academic press, Don E. Schultz and I have critiqued the dominant psychological model of advertising that presume this multi-step structure to be accurate. (If you'd like to know where to find any of these academic articles, please let me know.)
What's wrong with the model? Three assumptions
While the various schemes differ from each other in some respects -- primarily regarding where to draw the lines in subdividing the process -- they nevertheless contain some basic common assumptions. It is these common assumptions that are significant. Indeed, it is often the case that an explicit rejection of the transportation model does not serve adequately to displace these assumptions.
The basic structure of the transportation model involves a message that is put into acceptable form (encoded) for transmission through a medium of communication, transmitted and received, and retrieved from its altered form (decoded).
This assumes that nothing happens to the message itself, aside from transference.
We can isolate three main assumptions in this model that have become problematic in a contemporary context.
First assumption: there is a separation of channel and content. The message precedes the transfer and exists apart from it at the destination. The contribution of the channel is restricted to "noise," that is, a distortion of the original message.
Second assumption: the subjects who communicate are preconstituted and not really affected by the process of communication. They simply send and receive messages; what they "are" is another question entirely. (In this assumption, an old and intractable question comes up again: does society reflect media or does media reflect society?)
Third assumption: the effect of communication is understood only as the effect of isolated messages. There is no question of a general social effect and, especially, of a social effect deriving from the medium of communication itself rather than from the messages that the medium carries.
The BIG takeaway: These assumptions are incorrect, and the communication model that comes out of them is the dominant model existent within media planning, ad testing, et cetera. Our industry has denied the structuring of perception and expression of the media itself.
Marshall McLuhan revisited
From this perspective, Marshall McLuhan's media theory is an important point of departure. He views media of communication as technologies that extend and develop the capacities of the human body.
The development of media technologies is a continuous process of altering the environment by "amputating" our human capacities and delegating them to media. The characteristics of these media are the significant elements in rethinking media. Whatever their content, the media are potent constituents of culture.
For example, McLuhan is not interested in what is on television (why these programs rather than those programs or whatever is on the computer screen). Instead, he focuses on the overall significance of television -- or the personal computer -- as a medium of communication in defining the cultural environment and thereby how consumers perceive what they perceive. This is the true meaning of the slogan "the medium is the message."
Media do not have a definite content for McLuhan, rather they define and convey the perceptual patterns crystallized in previous media.
The "content" of TV is the play, the public announcement, and the con artist. What is new about TV is its form, the technological alteration of perceptual experience, and its influence of the whole media environment -- which includes also other media such as video, and speech.
Next: why it is both easy and necessary to extend McLuhan's thoughts on television to online activities and new technology, and what this means for advertising.
Joe Pilotta is Vice President of BIGresearch, and a Professor at Ohio State University, School of Communications. He holds two Ph.D.s from Ohio University (Communication Research) and from University of Toronto (Sociology), Canada. Senior Fellow, Midwestern Universities Consortium for International Activities (Bitten) and Co-Founder of the Center for Globalization, Guatemala.
BIGresearch, is a consumer intelligence company which creates a syndicated product from the consumers' point-of-view; their experiences, needs, wants, and difficulties in the consumer arena. Our monthly survey allows over 8,000 consumers to speak to the National Retail Federation, Retail Marketing Association and the President's Council of Economic Advisors. Our survey has been featured in numerous publications such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, myriads of local and international newspapers, online, as well as personally featured on CNBC.
