Commentary

People Are The Medium

by Joe Marchese , June 2, 2009

It has been some time since Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase "The medium is the message." What McLuhan meant is well stated in the Wikipedia entry: "...the form of a medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived." Today's successful marketers are taking into consideration McLuhan's statement and combining it with a new media fact: People are the medium.

Since long before "You" was named person of the year by Time magazine, people have been increasingly taking on the role of content producers, curators and distributors. Nielsen just released a report that found "total minutes spent on Facebook increased nearly 700 percent year-over-year, growing from 1.7 billion minutes in April 2008 to 13.9 billion in April 2009..."

One word: Wow. In all that time spent on Facebook, you know what people were doing? Consuming content created by other people. If marketers want to be a part of all those billions of minutes, then they have to realize that people are the medium they need to distribute their message through.

Take a second and consider what it means that people are the medium. Going back to Wikipedia's explanation of McLuhan's statement, it means that marketers have to expect that their messages will take on attributes of the medium, in this case the people. Success will result in a symbiotic relationship between people and the marketer's message, which will be influenced by the people that distribute it. Or at least it should.

Last week Stephen Baker published a fantastic cover story for Business Week,"Learning, and Profiting, from Online Friendships." While the piece explored most of the current thinking and innovative ways of making money in social media, it seemed to bypass what role the people who have all the "friends" will play in advertising. In my humble opinion, until we have scale, and a solution that respects people as the medium, marketing in social media will remain broken.

How would you apply McLuhan's statement for today's marketers? Drop me a line on Twitter @ www.twitter.com/joemarchese and/or leave a comment below. Last week the conversation here and on Twitter following my column was even more insightful than the original post.

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9 comments about "People Are The Medium".

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Michael Senno from New York University, June 2, 2009 at 1:42 p.m.
Great practical thought that sparks some philosophical debate - as always, Joe. In my view, the answer is it ALL depends on the person who has the friends, and marketers need to embrace.
People don't click on advertisements just because they appear during social interaction. Friends click on links that other friends RECOMMEND, not necessarily click on. Social advertising is about word of mouth. People are the medium captures the essence. Marketers need to enlist brand evangelists to get there message out. If a friend posts a ad video with a comment promoting, or raves about the burger at some restaurant - I'm going to investigate it. If I just see an ad for some product, I'm likely to do everything I can to avoid it.
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Antonio Montero from El Informador, June 2, 2009 at 2:11 p.m.

Great insights Joe. We are starting to see this principle applied in some marketing efforts. For example, Carl's Junior recently paid a group of 9 popular youtube creators to put their own spin on the brand's infamous Paris Hilton burger ad by showing how would they eat theirs. They estimate the campaign will produce 10 million views.

Sponsored conversations at blog networks like BlogHer.com are another good example of using people as the medium.

The principle behind this is very simple but powerful: People are more likely to be influenced by people they trust than by brands. With the web becoming more and more social, power is shifting to people and away from brands. This new context will require new marketing paradigms, and the "people as the medium" paradigm appears to be the at the top. A revolution is coming...

katie palani, June 2, 2009 at 2:14 p.m.

Hi Joe. This is very interesting. I just started working for a media company, and am finding a disconnect between the social media that journalism is attempting to adapt to and the reasons that these social media are so popular.

I think you've hit on it here with pointing out that it's not so much the content as the medium through which it passes. And I think this will be a tough climb for journalists to make, having been raised with the notion that content is king. It will be so interesting to see how this all shakes out in the upcoming years.

The company I work for now has a great Internet Ventures Group that is working on using social media as it was intended, really harnessing the voices of the people that use the new media tools on the news sites we manage. I'm looking forward to sharing this post with them to spur them on!

Lara Colton from Nielsen, June 2, 2009 at 2:30 p.m.

In social media, if people are the medium and the medium is the message, then by the transitive property, people are the message. Which means what to advertisers? Unfortunately at this early stage, it may mean that they are at risk of losing control of their marketing messages. When an advertiser runs a campaign, we still can’t determine which ad or which exposure actually moved each consumer to the purchase point because it becomes a personal decision steeped in the arena of individual psychologies. If we could actually discern which ad or exposure made the difference, our business would be more of a science than an art. But now while marketers are still trying to figure out how to get a consumer to buy a specific product, with the addition of social media, they have to figure out how to get consumers to think what they want about their products as well so that when the people convey it to others, the marketing message isn’t lost or twisted.

Think of the fragility of this challenge, a product could launch an awesome campaign and build tons of awareness which would lead to demand for that product, then one story about the parent company of that product, for example that says something like their production plant emits more pollution than any other plant, and the whole positive perception created by the campaign could be wiped out. So instead of people recommending this product, the message, from the people, could become, don’t buy this product because they are polluting the environment.

With people as the message, perception must become king for perception is reality.

What exciting times to be in our business!

Michael Mitchell from Byblos Press, LLC, June 2, 2009 at 2:31 p.m.

Joe: you missed McLuhan's point. People have always been the point, but he defined medium as "any extension of ourselves by any new technology." He further suggested that "many people would be disposed to say that it was not eh machine, but what one did with the machine, that was its meaning or message," but you would miss the point. "For the message of any medium or technology is the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." By saying people is the medium is a circular argument that negates his follow-on points of hot and cold media, reversals, etc.

Maria Pousa from AOL, June 2, 2009 at 3:17 p.m.

Hi Joe, thanks for the piece. I agree with Michael Mitchell about people being at the core of his concept. In addition, Facebook is the medium here, not people. People or subjects have always created content. What FB introduced as a medium is another way to create and distribute content in a democratized paradigm.

Joe Marchese, June 2, 2009 at 6:04 p.m.

@michael and maria You both make a great point. And probably a much better literal interpurtation of McLuhan's point at the time.

That said, while I agree that facebook is providing the tool set for people to publish, since facebook is not producing and distributing the content, the people are, then people must also carry the message. And it is people's attributes, not facebooks attributes, that marketers messages will adapt.

By definition when it comes to word-of-mouth, people are the medium. Facebook has a number of mediums, pictures, text, video, you could even call facebook a meta-medium, but none of that address the issue marketers face which is the commonality of people driving the distribution on message and content. That's why I focused on applying McLuhan's famous line to people, because it provides a framework for considering what marketers do need to understand.

All that said, thanks for the great, and probably more historically accurate, insights into McLuhan's work!

Michael Mitchell from Byblos Press, LLC, June 3, 2009 at 10:43 a.m.

Joe: I see your point. The power and the downfall of McLuhan is, for me--just when I think I get him, I get lost (and I have a PhD in the subject..). He is a complex read and his thoughts can be used in many different directions. Thanks for your thoughts.

Doug Levy from MEplusYOU, June 4, 2009 at 6:26 p.m.

Ah, yes, people are the medium! This is a great insight, I believe.

And, oh how complex!! Producing a 30 second spot or a print ad seems so simple compared a person as a marketing channel. The starting point, I believe… moving away from the idea of marketing as persuasion. I envision a future in which marketers are experts not in convincing people to buy things but instead in fostering relationships that are more akin to trusting connections between close friends.

Thanks, Joe, for adding to the dialogue.