Push & Pull

In our conversation about new media's role in a marketing world dominated by television and print, I got to thinking about how users interact with web sites as opposed to traditional media types. Marshall McLuhan would wisely point out that "the medium is the message," and his short, simple, and insightful statement seems particularly salient here. The beauty of the Internet is its customizability. Whereas television and print are, in essence, "pushed" onto the reader/user, the Internet is all about "pull," or how the user configures and personalizes his or her experience. The most successful sites are all about setting your preferences-- on a news site, you can select what types of news you want to hear about; on your blogroll you list the types of opinion that most interest you. The paradigm of "Internet as customizable medium" isn't easy to change, and may help to explain why blogads, banner ads, and spam--ways of mapping traditional media usage onto new media--have yet to be extremely successful.

It seems the solution is to discard traditional ways of using media, and look for how you can exploit the customizability of the Internet. Campaigns should use the built-in targeting inherent to Internet usage to create narrowcast messages. In this model, visitors who go to a NASCAR website are greeted with a very different message than those who go to Gay.com. While it's tempting to wholesale broadcast messages across a range of high-traffic websites--in the way that traditional political advertising was broadcast on a variety of television channels, effective use of the Internet for politicking depends, I believe, on targeting.