However, writing it as war rages, caused me to add an unanticipated candidate to the standard list of mediums like print, broadcast, etc. The commonalities between war and media, or war as a medium, became apparent.
Both share the defining characteristics of mediums. Both have goals, plans to achieve them and targets. And, both have a natural propensity to interfere with each other. War has a very unpleasant way of inserting itself, and its requisite choosing of sides, between media and its targets, consumers.
Webster's Dictionary of Media and Communication defines media as "an agency by which something is accomplished, conveyed or transferred". An agency is something that acts on behalf of, or someone, else. So what's typically accomplished, generally, is the conveyance of a marketing/sales pitch, and what's transferred, typically, is money as a result of a purchase decision due to a compelling message.
However, a consumer's purchase is not the only endgame. A regime change leading to an opinion change, is the professed endgame of the current war.
Thus, both adverts or spots and military campaigns are agents, each acting on behalf of someone else (an advertiser or a sovereign nation) seeking to accomplish a goal: a decision to purchase, whether goods (e.g. a generic drug), or, an opinion/conviction (e.g., generic democracy), via the conveyance, of a pitch via a medium (direct mail or air dropped pysch-ops fliers), to each agent's respective targets (captive consumers or a captive citizenry).
Winning minds and hearts!In this effort, will there be significant collateral damage to the civilian media sector because of the war? Will demographic and psychographic research of Asian markets need to be rewritten to factor in sectarian religious attitudes, ethnic antagonisms and affiliations, and preferences for old-Europe or new-Europe or US brands?
Will reciprocal boycotts like the brie - Burger King tiff between France and the US. appear? Probably not, or only minimally; but global anti-war feelings may well compound the already declining appeal of Western/American media content and add to the impetus for not only local media production but preference for local products. Thus, a part of the collateral damage of this war, not considered by the Pentagon, might include an indirect adverse impact to Western, particularly American, advertisers in Asia.All in all, this final rumination made me reappraise the impact our individual inputs in our respective mediums have on the collective opinions in target audiences.
All content generators, from writers of ad copy to scripted programming, are also agents, and will need to be sensitive to anything which might have a negative effect on the conveyances or transfers they seek to affect.
Without heightened sensitivity, these participants in the varied processes of media could become inadvertent agent provocateurs, and the casualties could be lost sales and markets captured by rivals. The already difficult task of marketing across regional, national, political, cultural and disparate tastes is only exacerbated by the additional dimension of acute and passionate views regarding the war and its protagonists. The law of unintended consequences is in full play, in both the war and the media.
