(2024-03-20) Rao The Message Is The Medium

Venkatesh Rao: The Message is the Medium. ....instead of a regular post, you get the slide-deck for my talk

The slides are probably going to be a bit cryptic for those unfamiliar with Marshall McLuhan’s theory of media, so here are some (hopefully helpful) notes.

For the talk, I decided to explore the changing foundations of marketing, starting with Drucker’s famous line that “the purpose of business is to create a customer,” and try and figure out if that line needs to be rethought. That led me to McLuhan’s famous aphorism, “the medium is the message,” as an important assumption underlying Drucker’s definition. (Drucker on The Purpose and Objectives of a Business)

The basic idea is that the Internet has emerged as a sort of meta-medium.

This allows any propagating message to shape its own communication path. So McLuhan’s aphorism gets turned around.

Another way to think about this is as follows: in the message producer context, the medium is the message, but in the consumer context, the message is (and has always been) the medium, because it gets transformed into a social object that mediates consumer discourses.

One consequence is that marketing and the persuasive arts in general have seen a curious trend towards increased certainty in execution and decreased certainty in objectives. Better rifles, foggier targets.

As a result, emerging marketing models have gradually been shifting from a finite game orientation, based on campaigns with clear goals, to an infinite game orientation, based on persistent (and responsive) presence in the consumer context.