Spread your idea in the best way possible

Imagine, please:  Thomas Jefferson sits perched on a red-velvet sofa in the reading room at Monticello, sipping Carmenere and reading John Locke.  Easy, right?  Now, try this: Thomas Jefferson sits around a television with friends drinking beer and commenting on V for Vendetta or Babel.  Not as easy?

No matter how convincing you make the image, it remains comical to imagine such saints of American history hooting and hollering at the local Cinemark over the latest flick.  How quickly we forget, however, that the printed word was the only media type available at the time; the printing press was half as old as it is today.  Today we have a multitude of options for conveying an idea: printed word, recorded audio, recorded video.

When I think about these types of media available, I tend to apply the following metrics to help me organize their use:

Ease of consumption: How difficult is this media platform to consume?  How long does it take to consume?  How much intelligence is required of the consumer? 

Potential audience: How many people are likely consumers of the media platform?

Depth of message: How many of the details of your message are lost in converting your idea to the media platform?  This is the most difficult of the three metrics to explain in words, but for simple analogy: How many books have we seen translated to movies that lose so much depth?

Applying these metrics to video and printed words leads to these conclusions:

Printed word: more difficult to consume than video, audience potential much lower than video, message depth much deeper than video.

Recorded video: consumption much easier than printed word, vastly larger potential audience, much more shallow message depth.

If you're willing to sacrifice a shallowing of your message to obtain a broad audience, a video-based approach is likely the tool most useful. (One wonders if Al Gore would have been as successful in bringing global warming to the front of the national conscience had An Inconvenient Truth been merely a book and no movie.)  If, however, keeping your message intact is more important than the size of your audience, then selecting a text-based approach seems more fitting (be it in the form of an op-ed, a series of blog posts, or a book).

In the paragraphs above I have presented a model that forces you, as a thinker with an idea to get across, to consider the broadness of the audience you desire.  Let's take this model and apply it to a wildly successful piece of media in American history: Thomas Paine's pamphlet "Common Sense."

By no means do I claim expert status on the months leading up to the American revolution but I'd speculate that Paine's overall objectives align much more closely with Al Gore's: affect social change on a nationwide scale without much regard for the depth of the arguments (An Inconvenient Truth isn't shallow, but it is more shallow than the grossly recondite environmental studies on which it is based).  Were Paine attempting this effort in 2007 rather than 1776, it's my belief that we would see Common Sense in a theatre near us and not in a local bookseller.

What's the shock and awe conclusion from this model?  The printed word is certainly alive and well but today faces competition from other forms of media that, under some conditions, are more effective social change mechanisms.

Comments

[Kyle Redinger]

Advertising pricing reflects the value of message formats

I’d argue that advertisers are well aware of the value of different formats. Look at the value prescribed to messages per thousand online views: $1 for Text, $20 for Audio, and $40 for Video (word-of-mouth estimates). This is an economic way to measure the value of a message in different contexts (or, maybe points to inefficiencies in the market). Generally, this refers to the “richness” of the ad.

Relevance maximizes the value of a message

I’d like to say the true value of a message is from its relevance to its audience. The value of a targeted text ad can increase 10X. So sure, social change has more value when it can be adapted to a broad audience, but advertisers put more value on direct user-relevant content. In the same way politicians see value in delivering relevant messages to the largest segments of people. Think about “NASCAR Dads” or the “Evangelical Christians.”