The Medium is Precedes the Message

It’s 2009. We’re presenting a coupon redesign to a client, and we’ve brought a refrigerator.

A real one. Magnets hold the client’s current coupons to the door, crowded among several of their competitors’. We want them to see the world through their customers’ eyes. And when their customers look at their fridges (the pre-smartphone equivalent of an email inbox), they see a sea of sameness.

Then we pull our brand’s current coupon down and hang the redesign in its place.

The impact alone sells it. The client approves the new design on the spot.

In advertising, the medium is often chosen before creative is developed, because the medium is a signal. A product launch deserves different campaign tactics than a holiday sale, and a crisis has its own channels.

Most of us already know this outside of work. We don’t invite loved ones to a wedding with a calendar invite. It’s too precious, too elevated, to outsource to something so… transactional.

We print invitations, make choices about the paper weight and font combinations, buy expensive wax seals, hire calligraphers, and debate the merits of vellum. All of this happens so every guest knows the significance before anyone picks out a dress or indicates chicken or fish.

The invitation tells them everything they need to know about how to treat this moment.

When Everything Arrives in the Same Rectangle

Inside most organizations, the medium never changes. Quarterly results get a deck. So does the Tuesday status update. So do the benefits enrollment, the acquisition announcement, the mandatory cybersecurity training, and the vision for the next decade.

Same 16:9 frame. Same template. Same font. Same conference room.

People read importance from the form before they reach the message. Call it meaning compression. Typical business communications strip out every signal of significance, then ask the audience to sort out which messages deserve how much of their precious, fleeting attention.

Many leaders read the glazed look across the table as apathy. But your audience is doing exactly what years of identical media trained them to do.

In a world where humans need both zigging and zagging, sometimes it seems all we do is zig.

If it matters, it can’t arrive in the same medium as everything else.

The Whole Vision Lives on a Laptop

Now it’s 2014. I’m on the executive team at a small company, and we’ve pulled everyone out of the office for an offsite. The CEO is going to walk the whole organization through the vision for the year.

Everything about the day says this one matters. The venue. The time away. Everybody together, in person.

Then the vision itself shows up in the same container as everything else.

It’s a thorough deck, and I’m sure it would have been well-received. But we never get the chance to see it. The tech won’t connect, which is the story of our lives.

Because the strategy lives only in the slides, it has nowhere else to go. I watch my CEO stand in front of his organization and tell them there won’t be a strategy presentation today. We’ll schedule a virtual follow-up when everyone gets back.

Oof.

The offsite did everything a good wedding invitation does. Then the most important part of the day ends up in the most ordinary container we have: a video call.

Put Your Biggest Moment Next to Your Smallest

This takes about ten minutes.

1. List what’s coming. The next five or six ideas you’ll present this month.

2. Rank them by stakes. What happens if this one doesn’t land?

3. Set the top one beside the bottom one. Same template? Same length? Same send-ahead, same slot on the calendar?

If the most important thing on your list arrives in the same medium as the least important, what have you already told your audience about how much to care?

The answer might still be slides. That’s fine, as long as you chose them. When you default to slides without examining whether they serve the moment, you’re making a choice.

A refrigerator is a strange thing to bring to a meeting. Maybe that’s why it worked.

What’s at the Top of Your List?

Look at the item you ranked as your highest priority.

• What would it cost, really, for the medium to send a different signal?

• Who needs to be there in person, and who can get the email?

• What could you not send ahead, in the name of significance?

When’s the Last Time You Zagged?

I’ve told you my two stories. Now I want yours.

What’s the most important thing your organization communicated this year? Did it arrive looking any different from the status update?

Hit reply and tell me. We’ll have a chat.

Put The Campfire Method^® to Work

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