At iMedia Connection, researcher Joe Pilotta has a two-part article about how new forms of communication are changing the landscape for advertisers. The article is pretty tough reading, and you have to swallow a big gulp of Marshall McLuhan, but the destination is fasicinating. He points out the all forms of media exist simulataneously in the perception of the consumer, and that the consumer moves seamlessly between them, using them more like our senses than like resources.

For instance, it’s not that I have ears but that I take in data from my cell phone and the answering machine and the radio, and I can’t necessarily remember where I heard things. I also web surf on my laptop computer during commercial breaks which means I hear commercials without necessarily seeing them. So how can advertisers decide what’s the right medium for their message? They have to plan to be multisensory.

Link: iMedia Connection: What’s New About New Media? (2 of 2).

Previous forms of media are incorporated “all-at-once” with digital media and attended simultaneously at anytime, anywhere. That means that consumers are watching television at the same time that they are doing things online, along with all other forms of media consumption….

The nervous system, the means of coordination of capacities in the human body, is externalized in the electric age. Not only capacities, but also what coordinates them into the functioning whole, are externalized. The patterning and coordinating function of the nervous system is auto-amputated and externalized into the global system of automation. At this point, the extension of human capacities through technologies comes to a break boundary. Having expanded, or “exploded,” to its farthest limit, the process reverses.

BIG payoff: Old media content will have diminishing value and multiple sensory advertising will increase in value.