At the dawn of the internet era and, a bit later, of the social media era, many sociologists believed they would lead to a more informed and enlightened world. The events at Tahrir Square, the subsequent Arab Spring, and later the Maidan revolt in Kyiv seemed, for a period, to support this contention. Marketing gurus posited the dawning of the age of interactive and one-to-one marketing, much like the bazaar of yore but on a global, post-modern scale.
But then the medium took over the message.
Marshall McLuhan, in his 1964 book, ‘Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man’, coined the phrase, “The medium is the message”, which went on to become a pop phrase that was widely quoted, right or wrongly, in a wide variety of contexts.
Marshall’s theory posits that the form of the medium embeds itself in the message, creating a symbiotic relationship by which the medium influences how the message is perceived. A corollary of Marshall’s theory was that a dominant medium would influence societal norms, politics and personal identities.
By 1964, TV was the dominant medium in the US and most of the developed world. In its days, TV as a medium was supposed to build a sense of collective experience and this community. Instead, it promoted a culture of consumerism and passive consumption. Advertising, of course, gorged on this medium that was so much in synergy with its objectives.
Sidney Lumet’s 1976 movie ‘Network’ is a trenchant yet entertaining critique of the Age of TV and its social impact.
When the age of social media dawned with Facebook and Twitter, the initial hope was that the medium would redefine interaction and create a participatory culture. Instead, it became another gatekeeper medium controlled by shadowy algorithms that created echo chambers promoting tribalism across many dimensions while delivering audiences to advertisers. The fact that it could provide a more narrowly targeted audience to advertisers than could TV resulted not in a more informed consumer but in an increased ability of brands to insinuate into the social and consumption profile of the consumer. Also, more brands could get into the act as social media lowered the threshold level at which advertising budgets were effective.
Going by the ultimate societal effect of the TV and social media eras, another corollary to McLuhan’s theory can be posited: that the societal impact of a dominant medium settles into the lowest common denominator in human nature!
With the rise of TikTok, social media is morphing, creating and strengthening a new medium.
Initially, social media sites like Facebook showed chronological updates from users’ friends and contacts. As the volume of posts grew, the networks employed algorithms to prioritise posts that had proved popular among the user’s friends.
TikTok changed that. As a recent article in The Economist notes, “TikTok decided that, rather than guessing what people liked based on their “social graph” – that is, what their family and friends liked – it would use their “interest graph”, which it inferred from the videos they and people like them lingered on. And rather than show content created by people they followed, it would serve up anything it thought they might like.”
TikTok’s growing popularity forced every other big platform to follow suit – Reels on Facebook and Instagram, Watch on Pinterest, Spotlight on Snapchat, and Shorts on YouTube.
The result is that social media is morphing away from an interactive medium into a video-first, highly curated engagement platform. In that sense, social media is on its way to becoming a TV-like medium. Thus, marketers and advertisers are beginning to adopt a grammar akin to their TV campaigns for their social media campaigns.
While social media platforms become places for passive consumption, users move their conversations and arguments off the open networks and into closed private groups like WhatsApp and Telegram, with implications for the business of political campaigns and the news media. Political parties like the BJP have made WhatsApp groups a key pillar of their campaign strategy. As social media platforms have moved away from highlighting news stories in their feeds, news media are increasingly trying to create channels on instant messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Telegram.
Currently, in India, the tendency is to use it as a mass promotional channel, sending messages to an undifferentiated mass of “mobile” numbers.
Marketers need to recognise that the platform offers two unique opportunities:
1) it allows for a convenient one-on-one interactive platform and
2) it allows a brand to create, communicate and enthuse a “fan group”.
WhatsApp marketing can become the communication edge of a whole-of-marketing Big Data and data analytics-driven approach. I call this Conversation Marketing. Data collected from retail outlets, e-commerce platforms, loyalty cards, and first-party data can enrich conversations with consumers and groups. Conversation Marketing allows marketers to open a genuinely interactive, one-to-one channel with consumers. Whether this turns out to be a chimaera as from the early days of social media depends on how both the owners of the messaging platforms as they move to monetise them as well as the campaign strategies of brands.