As a journalism major, I wrote for my college paper, The Daily Universe. It was the mid aughts, which was a transitional period for print news generally. Traditional newspapers (y’know, the ones printed on actual paper) had mostly figured out the whole internet thing by then, but not entirely. For us, we were printing the daily paper and publishing identical versions of every article online.
After I graduated, I heard through the grapevine about the various iterations the print version went through over the years — including a weekly publication called Friday 411. Then, in 2012, I heard through that same grapevine that the Friday edition would be printing its last copy. Curious, I went to my laptop and found the online article announcing the change. The article opened with: "You hold in your hands the final Friday 411 newspaper of The Daily Universe …"
Hopefully you see the problem here. I was reading this on my laptop; I wasn’t holding anything in my hands. They had taken the print article and published it online without changing a word, like they always had.
As an example of operational error, this is mostly innocuous. I certainly knew what was being communicated. But there’s a larger oversight of not understanding that “the medium is the message” — a phrase coined by Marshall McLuhan in his 1964 book Understanding Media. People don't separate what is being communicated from how it's being communicated. The format carries meaning, sets expectations, and is doing work before the message is ever absorbed. It's why marriage certificates aren't scribbled on backs of napkins and earnings calls aren't done through interpretive dance.
This happens in marketing constantly, usually also for operational or inertia-based reasons. And while I do want to focus on the overall concept of medium and message, I mostly want to use this as an opportunity to rant about how much I hate PowerPoint.
When something is actually being presented, PowerPoint is fine; that's what it's for. But for some reason, PowerPoint (or Keynote) has become the default format for everything — strategies, research findings, project plans, post-campaign recaps. It gets emailed around. It gets uploaded to shared drives. It sits there, waiting for someone to open it, then navigate slide by slide through content that was designed to be narrated out loud while also ignoring all the broken formatting now caused by all the non-functional build animations.
PowerPoint is fine for presentations; but for anything else, it’s bad. It's not easily scannable. It doesn't handle large amounts of data well. It’s not versatile, interactive, or able to create anything remotely complex. In other words, it’s only useful when the medium matches the message.
Here’s a similar mini-rant (starting at 19:55) on the topic from BBC Commissioning Editor Nick Lambon:
I once brought up this PowerPoint obsession directly with my manager — saying we shouldn’t be using PowerPoint for a particular project because of all the reasons I’ve covered — and their response was, “Let me say the thing you like which is ‘you’re right’ and then the thing you don’t like which is ‘let’s keep it this way for now anyway.’”
But back to the overall point, which is that fixing the frequent disconnect between medium and message isn't complicated, and is something marketers should actually be the ones championing. It just requires a moment of deliberate thought:
How will this actually be consumed? A piece of content meant to be read at a desk is different from one meant to be skimmed on a phone. A document meant to be filed and referenced later is different from one meant to be acted on immediately.
Is the format doing work or just containing information? The format itself communicates something — authority, informality, urgency, permanence. A handwritten note signals something a form letter couldn’t. An infographic signals something a dense white paper doesn't.
Are you choosing this format because it fits or because it's what you have? It’s not about reinventing the wheel; it’s about taking a moment to move forward with intention.
I’m actually thinking through these exact things as I continue to try to build this newsletter and the overall Marketing Isn’t Special brand. Much of this information is already a book; would it be better as a podcast? A video? The substance (i.e. message) of what I’d be sharing wouldn’t be all that different, but the format (i.e. medium) might better convey what I’m trying to communicate.
All that to say, the disconnect between medium and message is almost always the result of habit, inertia, and the path of least resistance. The medium and the message drift apart not because anyone chose that outcome but because nobody chose anything at all.
This is also what makes it fixable.
It doesn't require a new strategy or a budget or a consultant. It just requires someone to actually ask what’s the right path forward — something most marketing teams, in my experience, simply aren't doing.
If this resonates with you, consider subscribing. Each week I’ll share essays and commentary drawn from today’s marketing trends and my upcoming book Marketing Isn’t Special — all focused on improving how marketing is understood, measured, and valued.
If this doesn’t resonate with you, I would never begrudge someone wanting a less cluttered inbox.
