Media and The Message

by Nicholas G. Licata, M.A.

Format? [Back to Columns]

One of the readers of my last column questioned what I meant by the proper formatting of our media messages. I thought I should elaborate. Most of you reading this column will remember learning to read or ride a bicycle or any other thing that was at once difficult, but is now second nature. You probably, however, do not remember first learning to communicate.

Surely, one of the most difficult things for humans to learn, is to communicate. The task of interacting with ones surroundings and learning to express ones opinions and desires is a daunting task. So much so, that it requires a good portion of our first several years of life.

Aside from learning a spoken language, we learn to use and interpret body posture, tone of voice and facial expression. We learn how to use all of these techniques and under which circumstances they are appropriate. The process becomes so ingrained in us that we do not often think about how we do it each day. Certain situations, however, force us to evaluate our communication.

When the rules are so different and the circumstances so new that we have to completely re-learn how to behave: a first date, job interview, cross-cultural experience, etc., the experiences stick vividly in our memories. Through these experiences, we trudge awkwardly until we learn the new rules and can format our communication appropriately.

For example, everyone does and says things at home, that they would never do or say in a business meeting. That is because they understand the format of a business meeting and adjust their communication accordingly. When we break the rules, we receive non-verbal cues from the other meeting participants that let us know that our communication or behavior was inappropriate. By interpreting these cues, we make adjustments in our communication.

Mass communication is different. There are no instantaneous non-verbal cues that tell us when our media message is inappropriate for the medium or audience. Only through the evaluation of our advertising or public relations campaigns to determine if we have reached our desired goal, do we find out where we went wrong. This is a potentially costly learning experience.

It is easy to see that, under most circumstances, a democratic candidate would be wasting money by placing political advertisements in the Republican Party Newspaper. Similarly, a dealer selling abstract art whose beauty lies in its use of color would want to put a full color photograph of the artwork in its magazine ad, but due to the poor quality of newsprint and unavailability of color in many publications the same dealer might choose rather to put a photograph of the artist in its newspaper ad.

The answer lies in research prior to creating communications. By understanding the rules of communication for your medium and your audience and how they fit with your desired goals and objectives, you can create effective communications without wasting much of your advertising budget.