Commentary

Einstein's Corner: ROI - Return On Intimacy

Many years ago, I first suggested that the true promise and potential of digital media is intimacy. Accountability, I argued, could follow only in the wake of a willingness to engender and sustain one-to-one relationships, and intimacy would naturally emerge as the digital mamaloshen (mother tongue). Fade out.

Fade in. More than a decade later, our reluctance to embrace intimacy finds us -- not surprisingly -- further removed from both real accountability and intimacy than ever before. We suddenly find ourselves compelled to compensate for the fact that our target audiences now flee our entreaties at every opportunity with marketing strategies designed essentially to overwhelm and obfuscate. What might have evolved as a cooperative relationship between marketers and consumers has evolved instead into a nasty and escalating game of cat and mouse.

We became intoxicated with the massive narcotic power of our own technologies and media, and surrendered ourselves to them. Indeed, Marshall McLuhan's conclusion that the "medium is the message" describes the process of narcissistic narcosis, what happens when we become obsessed with our own images, and utterly absorbed by our own reflections.

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The narcotic effects of our obsessions with and addictions to media and the technologies that deliver them had predictable consequences, not least among them the ability to defer if not completely obliterate the emotional moment -- an essential function of all addictive behavior, and the pathological surrogate for emotional honesty. Gone with the emotional moment was the creative culture whose essential job was to invoke the emotional encounter and establish a co-conspiratorial intimacy based on mutual needs and desires, replaced instead by more technology designed to deliver more tonnage. We grew totally obsessed with our enhanced and vastly accelerated ability to deliver the message, at the expense of our ability to craft the message itself.

Any entreaties to re-institutionalize the creative culture as the key to precipitating and engaging the emotional moment in the pursuit of intimacy will fall on deaf ears as long as we continue to sublimate the creative idea to the tyranny of ROI. There will be little room and even less demand for quality creative as long as our addictive response to functionally limitless bandwidth remains unchanged: Eat all you want, we'll make more.

More, of course, is the only thing required of us by any addiction. Under the oppressive yoke of our addictions, we must work harder and longer with reduced expectations just to generate the same high.

Once upon a time we could live with the uncertainty represented by the notion that advertising worked 50 percent of the time. Now, however, we find the fact that we know with absolute certainty that advertising doesn't work 99.8 percent of the time absolutely unbearable. Our response is classic addiction 101: Faster, smarter, better. Eat all you want, we'll make more. The result: millions of consumers and thousands of corporations spend billions of dollars just for the opportunity to escape their escape and turn us off.

Millions of consumers and thousands of corporations have been hit over and over again from every conceivable angle -- and none have been touched in the process

Enough is enough. If we're going to make the collective effort to reach out and touch someone thousands of times each and every day, we simply better have something more worthwhile to say, some message worth touching them with. Return on investment is a lousy and poor performing alternative to the real ROI: Return On Intimacy.

What are your thoughts?

Many thanks, as always, and best to you and yours...

Please note: The Einstein's Corner discussion group at http://health.groups.yahoo.com/group/einsteinscorner/ is dedicated to exploring the adverse effects of our addictions to technology and media on the quality of our lives, both at work and at home. Please feel free to drop by and join the discussion.

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