The Creature with Two Brains

Digital and mobile are givens, but the medium is nearly irrelevant

The beginning of the year – any year – is filled with reviews and forecasts: what worked, what didn’t, what will, and what’s next. It’s all bloviation.
 
Despite Marshall McLuhan, the medium isn’t the culture for the viral spread of our marketing messages. Not anymore. There are no longer exclusive platforms for particular forms of communication – images, audio, video, text – because, thanks to microscopic computer chips, they’ve all been combined. Email can incorporate more than text, print can accommodate audio, mobile can be anything (and connect prospective buyers to anywhere), and the convergence of computing and television, which began in the U.S. with Qube in Columbus, Ohio, in the mid-1970s, has been taken for granted for years, though interactivity is relatively new.
 
Yet marketers still need to adapt. They need to understand what each medium does best, what their customers and prospects expect from each, and how they use it.

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