Touching Hearts And Minds

At a conference recently I was once again confronted with an old question "� what is more important, content or the medium? Content "� a much abused term in the recent dotcom-tainted past "� has always been the touchstone of any communication.

However, as Marshal Macluhan once said, "The medium is the message." Now it is increasingly becoming obvious that the medium and the message have melded into one mess.

To me the answer to the conundrum is a double helix where nothing begins or ends.

In print, on air, in film, on stage, it is the word that counts. From pre-historic cave paintings to an Imax film, from a 30-second jingle to a never-ending soap opera, it is the story that moves. Style is (or at least should be) always subservient to substance.

Along with the means of communicating, it is the combination of style and substance (which is finally the ability to excite, entice, enthrall and engage people) that all media professionals strive to achieve all the time. Yet success is usually elusive and mostly evanescent. This is what makes show business so challenging.

The last decade has seen the use of many epithets to describe contemporary times. From the post-industrial to the information age, from the smokestacks to the digital era, the change has been more than merely semantic.

The most cataclysmic change has been the rise of mass communications. From a knowledge economy, we are swiftly turning into an attention economy.

Various media and messages relentlessly assault our senses. There is constant talk of globalisation and massification of society.

What is becoming apparent is that at the very top of the pyramid there are a few global products which sell across demographics, but in most cases homologation or ethnocentricity is essential.

Marketers and media managers will in the days to come have to be adept at understanding popular culture. As the American cultural anthropologist Marshal Fishwick said in his seminal book 'Seven Pillars of Popular Culture', the basic structure of popular culture has remained unaltered for centuries.

"These seven pillars are: demos (communality), ethnos (roots), heros (uncommon people), theos (religion), logos, icons, and mythos (brave sagas). I have concluded that to survive, culture must always be popular.

The pillars we have seen and described are the very foundations of human life. Visible in the latest bestseller, film, commercial, or video game, they are also so ancient that we dare not even date them.

Perhaps 5 million years ago a kind of "ape man" began to stand erect and use sticks and stones as weapons. Several million years later came "upright man," and eventually, human communication.

With early cave paintings and writings, homo erectus began to share his experience"�and later to construct pillars. To me they are both symbolic and erected not only on mountains but also inside minds. What is involved is the continuous adaptation of traditional forms to changing circumstances and contemporary life. Culture is constantly being reintegrated and reassimilated: but is it, in basic ways, being changed?"

In a world where communication channels are exploding and fragmenting, audiences have more choices.

To gauge popular appeal is more complex than ever before. Rating points and readership surveys will only provide the foundation on which to build an effective metrics.

Conversely the creative professionals, especially those in television and films, will have to understand market dynamics rather than just their intitutive beliefs.

It is quite fashionable these days to talk in laudatory terms of the success of Bollywood films, family sagas and even 'language copyrighters' without realising the reason for successful communication.

A majority of decision makers are still Macaulay's children genetically altered by B-school gobbledygook. On the other hand the film (serial) makers are neo-literate regurgitators of stale tripe.

I am neither cynical nor despondent. I think we are in the midst of change. Technology is a great enabler and it moves in geometric progression.

Unfortunately, society develops in arithmetic progression. From the Neanderthal to the 21st century human, our fundamental emotional responses have virtually remained the same "� fear, joy, pain, jealousy, anger, love, lust, loneliness, kinsmanship.

Emotive appeal is the ability to touch one of these attributes. If we are able to strike the right chord, we are able to connect with our target group. This then translates into a sale of a product, a service or an idea. All media is trying to do this all the time.

And so are all other marketers. Obviously the ability to touch the maximum number of hearts and minds is what creates a blockbuster.

In the process of reaching the widest audience sometimes the homogenisation is so complete that the end product is most banal. This is a pitfall which folks in showbiz and advertising face the most.

What should one do in such circumstances? I think we have to have more inter-discipline interaction. Multi-skilling is the answer as far communication is concerned.

The digital world, which is fast erasing geographical boundaries, is also creating close communities. These communities, often far dispersed, are linked by language, nationality or culture.

The popularity of Indian films overseas, especially among the large Indian diaspora, is a prime example of this. Having said this, it is imperative that all communication to any community (that is, targets group) must be tailored accordingly.

As students of semiotics say, every society has symbols which convey much more than is apparent. Specificity in terms of speech, dress and demenour adds a lot of meaning to any communication.

Ultimately it is all about telling a refreshing tale interestingly or even a predictable one with some inventiveness.

Amit Khanna is chairman of Reliance Entertainment. The views expressed here are his own