In the second of two parts, Joe Pilotta of BIGresearch explains why digital media are a new form of communication, and what that means for advertising.
Editor's note: In part one of this piece, Joe Pilotta analyzed how our basic presumptions about media are flawed.
How people do things online and use new technologies derives from earlier media, or are these truly new forms?
Marshall McLuhan claims that a medium of communication has two cultural effects, a first effect and a later one that is a "reversal" of the first.
The first effect is due to the fact that specific social groups introduce new technologies in order to fulfill goals and purposes that they already have. Such a new medium gets filled up with a previously defined content that it presents in a new fashion. This function of a medium may be called "representation" insofar as its function is limited to a new manner or presenting a prior cultural content. For example, much digital technology is being filled with old line content from old line media from print, e.g. newspaper, magazines and other text (with the exceptions of video games and music video).
Different social groups will use the new technologies in different ways, or will choose to use different versions of the new technologies to achieve the same results. Looking at the data, we find significant difference between Google, Yahoo!, AOL, MSN and Ask Jeeves search engines users and the influence of email and internet advertising on their purchase decisions for various categories of merchandise, such as Electronics, Apparel/Clothing, Grocery (Food, Cleaning, Party), Home Improvement, Automobile, Pharmaceutical and Travel. From the McLuhan perspective this is an indication that search engine users are not a homogeneous digital audience but are separated by receptivity to the perceptual/express style of email and internet ads.
BIG payoff: Marketers, advertisers, and media planners must attend to how different media -- in the current example, search engines, email, and internet ads -- must be aligned with consumer preference for the perceptual style of the media. Furthermore, the product must be aligned with the perceptual style of the media.
The second effect: As a medium develops, the technology improves, and the perceptual and sensual auto-amputation (as McLuhan called it) that it achieves progressively becomes more successful, requiring less and less active participation from the viewer. In McLuhan's terminology, a medium "heats up" over time and accelerates the externalization of human capacities. Moreover, the technology becomes more widespread and affects more pervasively the whole cultural environment. It no longer simply represents a previous content, but becomes a significant new form of experience itself.
In short, a new technology becomes a constituent of a changed cultural order. This constituent role is not simply different from the first, more limited, effect but reverses it.
For example, the media becomes incorporated into daily life. Previous forms of media are incorporated "all-at-once" with digital media and attended simultaneously at anytime, anywhere. That means that consumers are watching television at the same time that they are doing things online, along with all other forms of media consumption.
The communication technology reverses the mode of transportation. For McLuhan the transportation model is a visual linear model, which is reversed to a resonance model (i.e. audio/non-linear), creating very different audiences. All receivers are simultaneous senders, and all consumers are simultaneous co-producers.
BIG payoff: Advertisers, marketers and media planners need to attend to the simultaneous media experience and how it is incorporated into the consumer's daily movement of scanning several media at once. It is no longer reasonable to presume that an advertisement has a consumer's undivided attention.
New sensory functions
As technology improves and increasingly comes to pervade the environment, it reaches a "break boundary" in which the initial effect is reversed and the medium plays a productive role in defining a new mode of perception and social relationship.
Not only does this occur with each medium of communication, it also occurs to a whole process of communication itself when this process reaches a break boundary. The externalization of human capacities in media technologies comes to a break boundary when the most basic capacity of the body is externalized.
All sensory functions are part of the new media form
The nervous system, the means of coordination of capacities in the human body, is externalized in the electric age. Not only capacities, but also what coordinates them into the functioning whole, are externalized. The patterning and coordinating function of the nervous system is auto-amputated and externalized into the global system of automation. At this point, the extension of human capacities through technologies comes to a break boundary. Having expanded, or "exploded," to its farthest limit, the process reverses.
BIG payoff: Old media content will have diminishing value and multiple sensory advertising will increase in value.
Online has reached a break boundary
Media technologies now "implode" to define the innermost capacities of the human individual, uniting each one in a coordinated "global village."
Media and consumer dialogue
While different media can be analyzed as referring to social life -- as mirroring it well or badly -- they also produce social relationships through a structuring of communication, i.e. perception and expression. Any communication has both of these dimensions. Moreover, these are not merely separate dimensions that could be properly understood in isolation from each other.
At this point we can expand upon how new media produce social relations by underscoring the social relations that are formed through both the consumption of the media's perceptual/expressive style as well as the "co-producing" of the perceptual/expressive style by the consumer -- not in a linear fashion but in a recursive and dialogical manner.
Understanding digital media and the new intensification of "all media" into, for example, a cell phone requires acknowledging the unique perceptual and expressive power of "new form."
New media and old forms
Media are productive and not mere vehicles to fill with content: or, in other words, the medium does not merely carry the message but also changes it.
Cyber media should therefore be understood as a new form of technology that heats up other media into a unique ecosystem of communication influence.
However, the new media industry continues to be content to operate on the old model of transportation:
- It places the message or content first
- It deems the channel to be less important: only distribution counts
- It values itself in terms of GRPs
- It compares itself to the stage of where print was 40 years ago
Why should we be surprised that the power of digital media is undervalued if its identity is based on antiquated and broken models?
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. He is a 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.