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| Bill Huey |
Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian-born English professor turned media studies guru who died in 1980, published his most important work, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man in 1964.
Now sixty rapidly changing and transformational years later, we can still benefit from some of McLuhan’s theories about media, such as the dictum that made McLuhan famous—“the medium is the message.” More importantly for PR practitioners, his observations about the “mosaic” quality of newspapers applies more than ever in the digital age.
McLuhan believed that newspapers, with their diverse and often disjointed articles, create a mosaic of information that readers piece together, forming multiple perspectives and interpretations, and actively engaging with the medium rather than passively consuming it. My own work in creating the first nonlinear advertising effects model in the shape of a double helix has persuaded me that advertising is something consumers do something with, rather than something that is done to them. This has major implications for everything from message content to media channel selection.
The practice of PR has changed a great deal since McLuhan was a leading savant, but practitioners would do well to remember that the mosaic quality of newspapers has remained much the same, and that many of the things we have always done still work. Moreover, the newspaper mosaic qualities became more widespread and evident as many newspapers entered the digital realm. Their effects have spread to other media channels such as television, turning newscasts from a largely linear, here-is-the-news-in-30-minutes affair into a continuous stream, with updates, inserts and features or investigative reports derived from headline news.
Given the rapid advances in media, impact and effects measurement has progressed at a much slower pace. Google appears to be interested in developing scientific measurement protocols for ad effectiveness, while the social media channel formerly known as Facebook, though claiming to use a variety of measures, still gauges effectiveness by dividing the number of clicks by the number of impressions and expressing the result as a percentage.
The field of PR must ride this tiger by applying its traditional storytelling and persuasion skills with a multimedia approach that can be documented and duplicated time after time. The roaring oncoming wave of artificial intelligence (which helped me write this article) will create immense opportunities for those who invest the time and effort in developing new skills and new tools.
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Bill Huey is president of Strategic Communications and the author of "Advertising's Double Helix: A Proposed New Process Model," Journal of Advertising Research, May/June 1999. His article about advertising effects has been cited in books and academic papers around the world.
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