Not the Medium, Not the Message

Before you get to that point, you need to get to this.

Marshall McLuhan was wrong. He wasn’t wrong at the time – the 1960s – but his maxim has not held up well over the decades. It’s the message that matters, regardless of the medium, and today that message gets re-purposed in numerous types of media (a concept that may also change as media converges).

Yet choosing both the message and the medium in which that message will initially appear takes more than a flash of inspiration. Those flashes tend to vanish in (yes) a flash. For ideas and their expression – in words and images – to endure requires the kind of long range vision that emerges from a comprehensive strategy.

Durability

Of course, B2B customers and B2C consumers can be fickle. They may pounce on new campaigns only to abandon them (like birds that are attracted to monarch butterflies and instantly learn that they taste awful); Kinko’s “The New Way to Office” is a perfect example. Or they may adopt characters like the Geico Gecko, Progressive’s Flo, Apple’s Get A Mac guys (“Hi, I’m a Mac.” “And I’m a PC.”), and IBM’s Chaplin character (to launch the IBM PC) and eagerly await the next ad.

Great B2B campaigns are harder to find, but only because they tend to be focused on a single target. I’ve seen superb work done in agriculture and industrial trade publications (both print and online) that are the equal of any consumer ads, including direct mail, email, video, and social.

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