Chapter 6
Big Honkin’ Ideas
Putting it all together
IT’S TRUE. EVERYTHING IS MEDIA, LADIES AND GENTS. Everything is branding, and it’s all for sale. Today you can print your client’s good name on the stripes between car spaces in parking lots, and citizens are selling space on their cars, their homes, even their foreheads. It’s crazy. It reminds me of one of my favorite Onion headlines: “Area 14-Year-Old Collapses Under Weight of Corporate Logos.”
We can either bemoan how we’ve become the dystopia once imagined in the opening scene of Blade Runner, or we can decide to fill all these new analog and digital spaces with stuff that’s interesting and cool. (Come to think of it, that Blade Runner scene was actually pretty cool.) One of Wikipedia’s contributors nicely summed up the draw of new media: “Within the advertising business there is a blurring of the distinction between creative (content) and the media (the delivery of this content). New media itself is considered to be creative and the medium has indeed become the message.”1
One last note here, before we talk about using all this cool media and technology. As explosive as digital is, it’s not likely it’s going to replace everything. Radio didn’t replace magazines. TV didn’t replace radio. And digital and social aren’t gonna replace TV. With each technological breakthrough, what we’ve seen is everything rearrange and find new natural places in our lives. It keeps changing, but what is clear is that brands are going to have to ...
