Three Words on Media. Or Six.

There was an obituary in last week's New York Times that I think those of us in the communications business really ought to think about. You can read it here. 

The obituary was of John Cleary. 

Fifty-five years ago when he was a 19-year-old freshman architecture student at Kent State University in Ohio, Cleary was shot by one of the one-hundred M-1 carrying National Guard troops Ohio governor James Rhodes ordered onto campus. This was after students burned an ROTC building on campus, protesting Richard Nixon's illegal expansion of the Vietnam war into neighboring Cambodia.

Four students ("four dead in O hi O as Crosby Stills Nash and Young sang) were killed. An additional nine were wounded.

I remember sitting in 7th Grade English and hearing about this. Cleary was just seven years older than I, a seventh-grader.

The M1 rifle like the ones carried by troops on the Kent State campus in 1970. General Patton called the rifle "the greatest implement of battle ever devised.

General George S. Patton, hardly a pacifist, famously praising the rifle used by government-directed US soldiers on college campuses as "the greatest implement of battle ever devised." The M1 has a muzzle-velocity of 2800 ft/second (it can travel a mile in less than two-seconds) tremendous penetrating power and an effective range of five-football fields, or about six city blocks.

Currently in cities across the United States, including Washington, DC, Chicago and Los Angeles, National Guard troops are wielding significantly more ballistic power: an M4 rifle and a M17 9mm handgun. The M4 can fire about 800 rounds per second, has about ten-percent greater muzzle-velocity than the M1 and about 10-percent greater range. 

The relatively benign M17 pistol today's soldiers are carrying has a muzzle energy of a mere 395 foot-pounds. That's considered ideal for hunting large game and long-range shooting.

The troops occupying amerry-cant cities today carry M4 rifles and the M17pistol.
These ain't cap guns.

In 1970, Life was "America’s ‘favorite magazine’ and had over 8 million subscribers.

Hold your horses, and your gunfire, I'm getting to the advertising point of today's post. And yes, despite all the gore, there is one. And you can find it reading an excerpt from Cleary's obituary in the Times.

I want to focus in on the two sentences I've underscored above. 

Today no photo, no image, no boom of gun-fire has impact. No news provokes anger. When Life Magazine was around the news had stopping power.

Stopping power today has been supplanted by "scrolling power."

As I've written many times before, in advertising, we used to strive for impact. We now make do with inundation. Thousands of dumb little ads rather than one powerful one.

They are not and never will be equivalent. 

Last week, I was talking to my good and wise friend Rob Schwartz about a campaign I was doing for a client who's important to my business. I must have blurted something about today's 'advertising a la mode's' practice of plastering the walls with messaging before the definitional message is established and woven together with an indelible image or an "etched in marble" set of differentiating words.

Rob said this. 

I wrote it down and tried to make it more memorable.

I even thought of a companion piece.

If John Cleary, or some other 19-year-old on a leafy campus were shot today, we'd scroll right by. 

Look! A cat video.
Look! A recipe.
Look! Sydney Sweeney in a tight-fitting dress.
Look! A banality.

Look! An outrage.
Look! Topeka State beat Fresno A&M by 12.

Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!
Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look! Look!

Look! At everything and see nothing.

All the looking has stopped us from stopping.

Stopping people is our job.

Instead we decry diminished attention spans, scattered media channels and keep on making invisible ads by the literally thousands. That's what we're choosing rather than concentrating our communication forces and trying to be big somewhere.

Today, we'd know nothing about John Cleary.

Just like no one knows anything about your brand.

--

PS. If you work in media and you'd like to debate this, I welcome the discussion. I'm not a media person and maybe I'm wrong.