I’m not a big fan of the TV series Mad Men.
But my wife likes it a lot, so I end up watching it.
Last week there was a sequence in it that I thought was actually very perceptive.
An account man is sitting at a dinner table next to a French philosopher.
The philosopher is cynical about advertising.
He says haughtily “So, what is your job?”
The account man says “I’m an account man.”
The philosopher says sneeringly “And what exactly do you do?”
The account man says “Well what do you do?”
The philosopher says proudly “I am a philosopher.”
The account man says “I hear you’re more than that, I hear you’re very eminent in your field.”
The philosopher raises his eyebrows, surprised that the account man has heard of him.
He says modestly “Well, perhaps you could say I am, yes.”
The account man says “In fact I hear you’re more than a philosopher. I hear you’re a fine teacher, too.”
Blushing now, the philosopher says “Well, my goodness, perhaps that is also true. Yes, indeed.”
The account man says “In fact, I hear that we’d all be a lot better off if we took a lot more notice of your views on many things.”
The philosopher is now thrilled and embarrassed.
He says “Oh, my dear sir, you really are too kind, thank you.”
And he shakes the account man’s hand warmly.
And the account man says “That’s what I do.”
Brilliant.
The account man turned the philosopher’s view from cynicism to trust in just a few sentences.
By talking about the philosopher instead of talking about himself.
By finding out about the target audience.
Instead of just talking about himself and what he wanted.
Which of course is the lesson for all of us.
It’s no good just telling someone what we want.
They already know that.
We work in advertising, we want their money.
But, instead of just nagging them into it, why don’t we look at what they want?
Instead of talking over them, let’s just listen to them.
In the military they communicate by walkie-talkie.
The walkie-talkie has a switch marked BROADCAST and RECEIVE.
You have to switch from one to the other.
You can’t do both at the same time.
This is to stop garbled communications in battlefield situations.
To stop people trying to talk over each other.
You press one button to talk.
Then, when you’ve finished, you press the other button to listen.
You either talk or listen, you can’t do both at the same time.
This makes for clarity of communication.
And clarity is what makes real communication work.
One talks while one listens.
Then one listens while the other talks.
If we do that we can find out what’s important to other people.
What do they want or need?
What do they care about?
Then we can work out why they should care about what we want.
How do we fit into their lives.
And we can crop up in their lives like an opportunity.
Instead of just another nag.
But first we have to realise that there are other people out there.
And they’re not a captive audience.
And they’re not interested in what we’re interested in.
And that’s who we need to be talking to.

We have to come off broadcast and go on receive.

In the ‘70s and ‘80s the world’s main worry was Armageddon.
The USA and USSR had enough nuclear weapons to destroy all life on the planet many times over.
All it took was one mistake.
That would trigger everything else.
Thousand of missiles, each containing dozens of warheads.
Each warhead hundreds of times bigger than Hiroshima.
In a nuclear war no one could win, because no one would be left.
The heads of the USA and USSR agreed to have talks.
These were known as the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks.
SALT for short.
As a result of SALT, America and Russia agreed to reduce their nuclear missiles.
Each side had spy satellites so they could monitor whether the other side were keeping their agreement.
What I love is what the Americans did next.
They got creative.
They still wanted an advantage over the Soviets.
So they designed what was called The Racetrack system.
They would limit themselves to the specified number of missiles.
But they would build five times as many silos as they needed.
And they’d have a long railroad going between them, constantly.
The railroad would have trains pulling missile containers.
The trains would stop at every silo for long enough to load, or unload, a missile.
The satellite wouldn’t be able to tell whether the missile was being loaded or not.
The train would then carry on, on its journey.
And the satellite would never know which of the silos the missiles were in.
So, with five times more silos than missiles, the Soviets wouldn’t know which silos to aim at.
And they wouldn’t have enough missiles to hit them all.
So even if the Soviets attacked first, the Americans would have more than enough missiles left to hit back.
Even though they’d kept scrupulously to the agreement.
But with each side having exactly the same amount of missiles, the Americans had the advantage.
Because the Soviets only had a one in five chance of hitting the right silos.
What I love is the way the Americans viewed the problem creatively.
They reframed it.
They got upstream and changed the context.
They realised, once everyone’s got the same number of missiles, missiles isn’t the issue.
Targeting the missiles is the issue.
Which means locating the missiles is the issue.
Missiles are limited, but silos aren’t.
So, if we build more silos, the Soviets won’t know which silos have missiles.
So, by building more silos than them, we effectively give ourselves more missiles than them.
The Americans understand predatory thinking.
Getting upstream and changing the context changes the problem.
And that gives you an advantage.
Because you’re not solving the same problem as the competition.
You’re solving a problem which renders their solution redundant.
They’ve been sidelined.
Taken out of the game.
Not by anything you’ve actually done.
Just by the way you’ve changed the context.

And, of course, that changes everything.

I’d forgotten how inspiring great media guys can be.
How creative the best ones are.
How they really get predatory thinking.
Mike Yershon was the media director all the creatives respected.
Because Mike broke the rules.
He looked to see what everyone else was doing.
So he could do the opposite.
Mike knew the opportunity was always in standing out from the herd.
And to do that, you had to know what the herd was doing.
Creatives respected Mike because he made their ads look better.
He made sure everyone saw them.
In these days of media independents, we don’t think of it as creative.
We just think of it as numbers.
Mike wasn’t like that, he was media director of CDP when I was a junior writer at BMP.
We used to watch Mike’s agency picking up new business faster than anyone else.
But they never pitched.
Because by the time the clients got there, they were already convinced they wanted to give CDP their account.
They’d seen all the campaigns, the work was famous and visible.
Clients wanted their work to be as famous as that.
What they didn’t realise was that Mike had bought most of the 48 sheet poster sites within half a mile radius of CDP.
Then he’d put all CDP’s posters up on them.
So that any new business client visiting the agency had already been exposed to all their work by the time they got there.
Mike used the streets all around CDP as the agency’s showcase.
Clients didn’t know that.
They just thought “I’ve seen all these ads, they’re famous. I want this agency to make me as famous as that.”
So they gave CDP their account.
The best media guys get predatory thinking.
And, as one of the very best, Mike understood it more than most.
All media departments would get the upcoming TV schedules so they knew what programmes they were booking into.
That’s what everyone did.
So Mike did that.
But he also did the opposite.
He got the TV schedules for the BBC channels.
Why did he bother with that, you couldn’t even run advertising on the BBC channels?
But Mike wasn’t just judging when and where the ads were running, but what was running on the other side at the same time.
It often meant expensive spots weren’t worth the price.
Because people would be switching over to BBC at that point.
So Mike wouldn’t waste his client’s money on those spots.
It also meant Mike could spot the great value on some really cheap spots no one else wanted.
Because people would be switching away from BBC at that time.
Right into the cheaper ad spots.
So those spots were worth much more than they cost.
Mike knew more about what people were going to be doing than the people running the commercial channels did.
With predatory thinking, Mike was getting more bang from every buck.
Because he bothered to find out things the others didn’t.
So he could see value where they couldn’t.
Mike understood what predatory thinking is really about.
Context.
Context controls everything.
So control context and you control everything.
But of course that takes a bit more effort.
And that’s too much like hard work for most people.
So most people don’t bother.

Which is good news for predatory thinkers like Mike.

For me, one of the best copywriters ever is Ed McCabe.
Recently he was interviewed about advertising.
As always, Ed hit the nail on the head with a pile driver.

“Ed McCabe said: “I have a theory that comes from the smoking era. Suppose you need a light.
If you walk up to someone on a busy street and say, ‘Excuse me sir, I don’t want to be a nuisance, but I wonder if I could bother you for a moment?’ they’re gone.
But if you come right out and say, ‘Got a match?’ you get your light.”
When asked about today’s advertising, Mr. McCabe referred to the broad use of social networking, and he stressed that the objective of advertising is to sell a product.
“Right now we have a situation where ad agencies are screwing around, trying to embrace technologies that they don’t quite understand, trying to prove they are with it,” he said.
“The world is full of these people dancing from foot to foot, but there aren’t many of us coming up and saying, ‘Got a match?’ ”

Ed gets it.
When I was younger I had one of Ed’s quotes on the wall behind my desk.

“Any ad that doesn’t cause a ruckus is a lousy ad.
I’m constantly in trouble and I think that’s proof of my worth.”

Ed understands we don’t work in limbo.
We work in a context, and that context is a blizzard of over-communication.
£18.3 billion a year spent on all forms of advertising and marketing in the UK.
4% remembered positively.
7% remembered negatively.
89% not noticed or remembered.
So shouldn’t that be our primary focus, to be noticed and remembered?
To stand out.
To cause a fuss.
Ed knew the job is to get noticed and remembered.
Without that you have no chance of being acted upon.
So Ed’s purpose in getting into trouble is to get noticed amongst the sea of bland waffle.
If you can be outrageous, controversial, confrontational, you have more chance of getting noticed.
Not least because your competitor spends their media money answering you back.
If your competition isn’t doing that, it probably means your advertising isn’t upsetting them.
Which means they feel safe in ignoring it.
If your competition can ignore your ads, how can they be working?
But there’s a hiatus in advertising at present.
If we concentrate on execution we can make nice films without upsetting anyone.
So we spend a lot more money making dull ideas slicker.
Better props, better lenses, better lighting, better actors, more CG.
It’ll even win awards.
Because everyone’s concentrating on the execution, it will be a nice piece of film.
It just won’t be an ad.
Not in the sense that Ed McCabe is talking about.
There’s a David Ogilvy quote I always liked:

“When Aeschines spoke, they said ‘How well he speaks.’
But when Demosthenes spoke, they said ‘Let us march.”

Advertising today is Aeschines.
Ed McCabe is Demsothenes.

Kierkegaard said “Life can only be understood backwards, unfortunately it must be lived forwards.”
Obviously, we can’t understand something that hasn’t happened yet.
The nearest we can get to that is called prediction.
Years ago Mike Greenlees predicted what would happen to advertising.
A fashion started for very expensive commercials no one understood.
Beautifully made, but dull and invisible to anyone outside advertising.
Mike said “That’s the way it’s going to go. Because it takes less courage for a client to approve an expensive campaign that says nothing, than a cheaper campaign that has impact.
For a cheaper campaign to stand out it would have to be controversial, confrontational, and daring.
There’s a lot of risk in that for a client.
For a client to approve an expensive ad that says nothing is much less risky.”
To me, that seemed silly.
The real issue, surely, was to do advertising that multiplied the advertising budget in terms of visibility.
Getting noticed, getting word of mouth, getting repeated.
If you did that you were creating free media.
Mike said, you just wait and see if I’m right.
Well I did, and he was.
Here’s why I think it happened.
It’s about lack of confidence and risk avoidance.
Broadly speaking, people are divided into two groups.
Opinion Formers and Opinion Followers.
If you look at any group of men, in a pub for instance, you’ll see one guy doing most of the talking and the others listening.
He’s an Opinion Former, they’re Opinion Followers.
One Opinion Former can influence many Opinion Followers.
So if you want to get into the language that’s how you do it.
You get Opinion Formers to pick up your message and repeat it.
That makes sense, right?
That’s the real media we want to trigger, right?
Opinion Formers.
Now obviously Opinion Formers are a different kind of people to Opinion Followers.
They are more confident, more independent, more outgoing.
They like to stand out in a crowd.
So that’s the sort of advertising they like.
Opinion Formers look for advertising that is more unusual.
More original, ads that gives them something they can talk about.
But Opinion Followers aren’t like that.
They are quieter, less confident, wanting to fit in, happy to be led.
So Opinion Followers prefer advertising that is less challenging, more conventional, more predictable.
What sort of advertising should you do?
Well it depends on what effect you want.
Opinion Formers influence many Opinion Followers.
So that’s who you talk to if you want to go viral.
Not just internet ‘viral’.
Real viral, via the real social media.
People.
If you want to get your ‘idea’ spread by ‘word of mouth’.
But that’s the problem.
The words “idea” and “word of mouth”.
To get picked up and passed around in the real viral media of people you need ‘ideas’ and ‘words’.
Not just executions.
Expensive executions don’t get spread by ‘picture of mouth’.
That isn’t how people work.
So visual advertising doesn’t get word of mouth media.
It can only be passed on via electronic media.
It can only be viewed via electronic media.
So it doesn’t live outside electronic media.
In other words, not in our real media: people.
It isn’t passed on at the pub, at Starbucks, on the train, in the street, in conversation, or anywhere our real media interacts.
So why do we do advertising like that?
Advertising that can’t get passed on outside the world of electronic media.
Well, back to Mike’s original point.
There are many more Opinion Followers than Opinion Formers.
So naturally, in advertising and marketing, there are also many more Opinion Followers than Opinion Formers.
People who are risk averse, who seek comfort and conformity.
And that’s who creates and approves most of the advertising.
Which is why Mike was right and the balance has swung away from ideas, towards expensive executions that don’t mean much.
And that’s why our media has changed.
From Opinion Formers to Opinion Followers.

And, although it feels safer, it’s actually a lot more expensive and a lot less effective.

Spinal Tap is a mock documentary about a heavy metal band.
In the film, the guitarist explains to a reporter why they are better than other bands.
They are louder.
He shows the reporter the controls on their amplifier.
He says “Look man, normal amps only go to 10. These go up to 11.”
The reporter asks why they don’t just mark the loudest part as 10.
The guitarist looks confused.
He says “No man you don’t get it. Normal amps only go up to 10. These go further, they go to 11.”
We laugh because the guitarist doesn’t get it.
Being a rock star, he’s taken so many drugs his brain is fried.
He doesn’t get that adding another number to it, doesn’t actually make it any louder.
The loudest is the loudest.
100% is 100%.
That’s all there is, there isn’t any more.
We think he’s a dope for not seeing that.
Then we carry on and live our lives exactly the same way he does.
We live as if 100% isn’t all there is.
That’s why we say we’re “going to give 110%”.
This is self-delusion.
And this is why we are unsuccessful.
We act as if new stuff can come out of thin air.
If we make a new product, new consumers will magically appear.
If we put more information in an ad, new space will somehow be created.
If we want something badly enough, it will somehow happen.
New stuff will appear.
If we write 11 on the amplifier it will become louder.
But it won’t.
Because all there ever is, is 100%
That’s what a zero sum game is.
No new stuff can appear.
You can certainly get whatever it is you want.
But you can’t get it out of thin air.
If you want it, you have to take it from somewhere else.
If you want new consumers, you have to take them from someone else.
If you want space to put more information in an ad, you must make everything else smaller, or take something else out.
If you want the amplifier to sound louder, you must make everything around it quieter.
All there ever is, is 100%.
All you can ever do is take some of that 100%.
Which means, in order for you to have more, someone else is going to have to have less.
Sorry, that’s the way it is.
That’s how the world works.
Everything lives off something else.
Bigger animals feed off smaller animals.
Smaller animals feed of insects.
Insects feed off plants.
Plants feed off whatever they feed off.
Everything feeds off something else.
As Adam Morgan said, it’s a knife fight in a phone box.
And the people who don’t want to admit that are the ones who fail.
The people who don’t want to use their brains.
Who are too lazy or too frightened to think.
They become the prey.
Because they act as if they don’t need to identify where their share is coming from.
So they just wait for it to appear from out of nowhere.
Oblivious to the fact that they are deluding themselves.

Writing the number 11 on the amplifier.

When I was a very small boy, I had my first experience of the consumer society
My mum brought home a roll of toilet paper.
We’d never seen one before.
No one on our council estate had.
Dad asked what it was.
Mum said you used it to wipe your bottom after you’d been to the toilet.
Dad said, what’s wrong with newspaper?
Mum said this was the new thing.
Dad said, so let’s see if I’ve got this right: we’re going to be throwing the newspaper away, and paying money for something else we’ll also be throwing away?
It didn’t make sense.
But Mum said this was much nicer and from now on we were having it.
And that was my first experience of the consumer society.

What you want rather than what you need.
To Dad it just seemed a waste of money.
What was the point?
Mum’s point, of course, was to make the house nicer.
Nicer was a concept Dad’s generation didn’t have.
Function was the concept Dad’s generation had.
What worked, what did the job.
In the world Dad grew up in, everyone spent their life just trying to get what they needed to survive.
Clothes, shelter, food.
Clothes, the function was to stay warm.
Shelter, the function was to stay safe.
Food, the function was to stave off hunger.
Dad’s world was about identifying the problem and fixing it.
But the world was changing.
The consumer society.
It started in America in the 1920s.
In those days everyone was just buying what they needed.
But America was making many more goods than people were buying.
More than people actually needed.
So they had to make people start buying more than they needed.
They had to turn occasional purchasers into constant consumers.
So they got The President’s wife, Eleanor Roosevelt, to make a series of commercials aimed at women.
She said, women would look more attractive to their husbands if they surprised them by wearing different clothes.
Constantly changing their clothes would stop their husbands getting bored and looking at other women.
So the need for clothes to be hard-wearing and long-lasting was replaced by the need for change.
Change for the sake of change.
And the fashion industry was born.
Fashion and novelty are pretty much where we are today.
The pendulum has swung completely the other way.
In fact, functional is now almost a dirty word.
We no longer value ‘better’.
We only value ‘newer’.
Function follows form.
George Orwell was born in the same year as my dad.
Being the same generation, he had the same views.
There is an excerpt from the book ‘Amusing Ourselves To Death’ on George Tannenbaum’s blog.
It illustrates the diametric difference between the views of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley.
Like my dad, Orwell didn’t see the consumer society coming.

“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books.
What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban books, for no one would want to read one.

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.
Huxley feared those who would give us so much information we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.
Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

Orwell feared we would become a captive culture.
Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture

In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us.
Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

Oprah Winfrey is estimated to be worth 2.7 billion dollars.
Her TV show was watched daily by 14 million people in the US.
It’s also broadcast around the world, in 140 other countries.
Her support for Obama delivered a million votes.
She has her own magazine, called O.
This regularly sells 2.5 million copies.
That’s as much as Vogue and Marie Claire put together.
She has her own website called Oprah.com.
This averages 70 million page views and 6 million users, a month.
She was on Life Magazine’s list: “One Of The People Who Have Changed The World”.

She is also on Time Magazine’s list “The Most Influential People Of The Century”.
In fact, she is the only person to have been on it 8 times.
So this is someone who’s good at their job, right?
Wrong.
We don’t have people who do things, anymore.
Nowadays we have people who achieve ‘iconic status’.
Because it’s not about product.
It’s only ever about ‘brand’.
Oprah has moved beyond being a person doing a good job.
Oprah is a brand.
And you can put a brand’s name on anything and it will sell.
Because people don’t buy products.
They only buy brands.
It’s the mantra that lets us all go on autopilot.
We don’t have to think anymore.
Brands are everything.
And, in media terms, Oprah is the supreme brand.
That’s what David Zaslav, the CEO of Discovery, thought.
He offered Oprah her own TV channel.
It would be called OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network.
She wouldn’t have to work so hard as she did when doing her show.
Planning, producing, researching, interviewing.
Now she could relax.
She had built the brand.
People would flock to the brand.
And so, Oprah stopped doing her show and the TV station was launched.
Now the TV station is a year and a half old, and the numbers are in.
How successful is it?
Well, it gets just 318,000 viewers during prime time.
That’s just 2% of what Oprah’s TV show was getting.
Oprah Winfrey Network just announced it lost $142 million this year.
They had to sack 30 of their 150 staff, 20% of the workforce.
So went wrong?
Why aren’t millions flocking to ‘the brand’?
Well, Oprah isn’t on the channel as much as she was on her show.
But why should that matter?
The channel is still named after her.
They still have the brand.
And the brand is all-important, right?
Nothing else matters.
Or is it just possible the brand isn’t the be-all and end-all?
Is it just possible the product might have something to do with it?
IMHO the smartest person to come out of this is Oprah herself.
She didn’t put a penny of her own money into the TV channel.
She didn’t have to.
That’s how intoxicated with ‘the brand’ Discovery’s CEO, was.
David Zaslav told Oprah “I don’t want your money. I want you.”
Well, now he has the brand.
But he doesn’t have Oprah’s 14 million viewers.
Is it possible that what people were buying wasn’t just her name, but the product?
The brand argument is very seductive for media people.
People who live only in the world of media.
We believe the whole world lives for media just like we do.
And media can amplify brands.
Consequently, all people ever think about is brands.
But it doesn’t work like that in the real world.

In the real world, products build brands, brands don’t build products.

Years ago, when I was at art school in New York, I bought a paperback by Marshal McLuhan.
It was called The Medium Is The Massage.
Years later, in London, I would hear people referring to it as The Medium Is The Message.
I wanted to correct them, but I wasn’t sure I should.
I knew what they were saying made more sense.
But it wasn’t what the book was called.
So, many years later, I went online and checked it out.
I’m glad I did.
It made me respect Marshal McLuhan more than I previously had.
Because it turns out we were both right.

Both titles are the title of the book.
What happened was that McLuhan’s original title for the book was The Medium Is The Message.
But the proof came back from the printers with a misprint.
The Medium is The Massage.
The printers offered to reprint it.
But, and here’s the bit that really makes me respect him, McLuhan said no.
He said it’s better like this, in fact it’s perfect, leave it.
And that’s what the book was called.
The Medium Is The Massage.
McLuhan liked the ambiguity, the confusion, the need to work it out.
He liked the fact that it made the reader think, instead of just being spoon fed.
The new title was provocative, rather than merely didactic.
This way it had four possible interpretations.
The Medium Is The Massage.
Everything we see, all the media we consume, merely lulls us into semi-consciousness.
It strokes us and soothes us and stops us thinking.
We have become merely passive consumers to be manipulated.
The Medium Is The Mass Age.
Mass media has made us incapable of thinking for ourselves.
Now we are merely part of the herd.
The more intrusive, the more ubiquitous, the more insidious mass media becomes, the more we are all just part of one inert lump.
The Medium Is The Message.
The medium is no longer just the delivery system.
The medium itself has become the content.
Simply being part of the media says more about you than whatever message you put in it.
Because the tsunami of mass media means we have no time to engage with each individual point of view.
The Medium Is The Mess Age:
The creation of mass media means we have to fill the constant demand of that mass media.
Which means the medium itself becomes insatiable.
The beast has to be fed.
Content has to be produced, to a format, to a cost, to a schedule.
Quantity is now far more important than quality.
Of course, each of these four interpretations could be a book in its own right.
Which is why McLuhan loved the misprint.
It caused his idea to explode into something bigger.
It caused people to think for themselves not just passively consume his thoughts.
And that’s what gave me new respect for McLuhan.
He wanted to provoke.
He didn’t just want to pontificate.
He wanted to force people to ask themselves the question.
Not just preach an answer.
And that’s what’s strange.
Lots of people took his book as the answer.
The Medium Is The Message.
“Okay, McLuhan is saying in that book that execution is everything.
McLuhan is saying right brain is all-important and left brain is now unimportant.
McLuhan is saying the emotional mind counts more than the rational mind.”
No.
What McLuhan wanted the misprint to do was provoke debate.
Provoke thought.
But what McLuhan didn’t allow for is that people don’t want to think.
They want an easy answer.
They want a formula, so their minds can go on autopilot.

Which is why most people didn’t even notice the misprint.

When I was at art school in New York, I bought a paperback by Marshal McLuhan.
It was called The Medium Is The Massage.
It was written at the beginning of the explosion of electronic media.
McLuhan was saying that the media was actually more important than what went in it.
That you said more about yourself by how you said it, than what you said.
At the time, this didn’t make sense to me.
How could a bad TV ad be better than a good press ad?
How could a bad poster be better than a good radio ad?
Or vice versa.
And I dismissed it.
I was trained in the Bernbach school of advertising.

In order to be effective we had to treat the consumer as if they were as intelligent as we were.
That meant using the power of reason.
But that seems to be a vanishing opinion.
It seems McLuhan has been proved right.
Today the media is nearly always decided before the creative work is even briefed.
So the medium always precedes the message.
Creative worked is now required to fill a pre-booked slot.
So, by general agreement, the medium must be more important than the message.
To make the distinction of medium and message clear, McLuhan uses the example of a lightbulb.
He says a lightbulb is pure medium.
It has no message.
But when you turn it on, it immediately transforms the world around it.
This demonstrates the power of the medium.
But our mind doesn’t focus on the medium.
Our mind focuses on the content.
So our mind doesn’t really notice the lightbulb.
It only notices what it illuminates.
McLuhan uses the analogy of a burglar and a guard dog to describe the way our minds work.
The medium is a burglar.
Our mind is a guard dog.
The ‘content’ is a piece of steak.
The burglar tosses the steak to the guard dog.
The dog concentrates on the steak and ignores the burglar.
McLuhan uses this analogy to describe the way our minds don’t even notice the power of the medium.
So is McLuhan right?
In my experience, yes and no.
I buy lots of books on my iPad.
All the time.
But suppose, for whatever reason, I couldn’t download any books.
I wouldn’t forget about books, and start playing games on my iPad, instead.
I’d go to the bookstore and buy some books.
Because I want the content, not the delivery system.
In this case, the message is more important than the medium.
On the other hand.
When I get home in the evening, I crash out on the sofa and put the TV on.
And I watch whatever’s on, even if I’m not interested.
Right next to the TV are a stack of DVDs.
If any of those films were on TV, I’d switch over immediately.
But I’m too knackered to get a DVD out of the box and put it on.
So, in this case, the medium is more important than the message.
Medium 1, message 1.
But is the medium really more important than the message in advertising?
When David Abbott began advertising The Economist, they were running TV commercials.
Because that’s the medium you use if you want a quick uplift.
One evening, David and Ken New, the media director, were chatting.
David said “It’s a pity we can’t do posters.”
Ken said “Why is that?”
David said “Well, a 48 sheet poster is the same proportions as the Economist masthead. We could run intelligent headlines, white out of red, and we’d have a massive branding campaign everywhere. But the numbers probably don’t stack up.”
And Ken said “Don’t worry about the numbers David. I can make the numbers work.”
And that’s how one of the best advertising campaigns ever happened.

Because the message was more important than the medium.