Troubling ’07 Forecast for the Old-Line Media but Not for the Online is the headline of the New York Times article that captures industry speculation on where advertising dollars are flowing. Nothing new here: impending doom for “old-line” (3% growth) and wild spending (27% growth) for online (excluding search).

In my day job I help make sense of things like this for companies. So I won’t do that here. But one of the lessons you learn about sensemaking–especially as your aim moves further to the future, is understanding the limits of the language you’re using. We are entering an era where we don’t have the right language to make sense of what is happing.

Offline, online.
Old, new.
Analog, digital.
Measured, unmeasured.
Above the line, below the line.

Some comparative words get closer to helping:
Broadcast, interactive.
Long-form, short form.
Audience, users.

Then it gets blurry:
Subscribers, visitors, audience, users, consumers.
Push, pull, targeted, mass, personalized, personal, social.

I think the difficulty in making sense of advertising now and in the future is that we just don’t have the right language. We’re using terminology that no longer helps make things clearer and more usable. We have to go back to the basics — the patterns and forms and architecture of communication, attention, and motivation.

Television and all the marketing/media terms that come with it aren’t so helpful anymore. What makes television television? I can watch Lost on my 36″ Sony Television, my 20″ Sony monitor, or my tiny Ipod screen. Is “Lost” still a television show? I can find characters and places from the “show” on the web, in forums, on blogs. And the “story” is broader and deeper in those places.

You can interpret forecasts of shifting media and marketing dollars across channels/mediums like most will — that people are spending time and attention in different places and ways and advertising must follow them. I think if you use the same language as everyone else, you’ll come to that same conclusion. And that conclusion leads to an undifferentiated advertising space where the competition for attention and relevance eliminates more and more value for company and customer alike. Finding the right language is the first step to change the playing field and make the goal seeding, tending and growing value, rather than hunting and capturing it. It’s all about the language.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 5th, 2006 at 6:47 am and is filed under Web, Thought, Media. It is further classified using the following tags advertising, attention, language, marketing, Media, patterns, television, Thought and Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.