BIOLOGY LESSON

Ofcom. Office of Communications. Asleep yet? Well don’t drop off. Because if you do (and ordinarily I wouldn’t blame you) interesting marketing publications will pass you by.

It has a thrilling title: “Communications – The Next Decade: A collection of essays prepared for the UK Office of Communications”. Wake Up at the back! One of the essays is by John Naughton. He’s the guy you may have come across doing a technology column in The Observer, normally having a pop at Microsoft. However, here he really spreads his wings.

Here’s the précis of his argument: “Media is the plural of medium, a word with an interesting etymology. The conventional, everyday interpretation holds that a medium is a carrier of something. But in science, the word has another more interesting, connotation. To a biologist, for example, a medium is a mixture of nutrients needed for cell growth…. In biology, media are used to grow tissue cultures – living organisms. … An organism depends on a media environment for the nutrients it needs to survive and develop…. The key point of the analogy is simple: change the medium and you change the organism. “

What Naughton proposes is a new communication discipline – “media ecology”. That is to say media as environments.

I think this s a great challenge to both media agencies and creative agencies alike. Being media neutral goes from being sooooo de rigueur to soooo wrong. There is nothing neutral about media. Media must be “connected” to ensure that brand thrive and survive.