Newsflash. Once again, for the 4th year in a row, our WPP sister firm Millward Brown Optimor has named Google the world’s #1 brand of any kind. Surprise, surprise, surprise.
Interestingly, our company recently did a far less scientific piece of research among our own employees that also said something uniquely enlightening, though entirely different, about Google.
Members of our media/experience team circulated a one question internal survey asking everyone to list their three favorite media sources. The intention was to use the results in an orientation session to show how diverse our own media preferences are. And the results confirmed it, with nearly 125 “top 3″ sources collectively named.
But what jumped out at me was not the variety of unaided answers. Nor the overwhelming dominance of CNN (see Wordle results below, kudos CNNers), across almost every department in the agency (other crowd favorites were ESPN, MSN, Fox News, ABC, Wired, along with one medium, radio).
Mighty Google looking more like David than Goliath
What jumped out, rather, was in fact, what didn’t jump out; Google.
Think about that a minute. In a world where Google plays such a pervasive role in so many people’s lives, in an industry that’s been pretty much turned upside down by the immense power of Google itself, a relatively small number of us “industry insiders” think of Google as a “media source.”
While I suppose this shouldn’t be totally surprising, I found seeing it so clearly to be pretty enlightening.
To be quite clear, this doesn’t lessen Google’s omnipresent and ever-expanding role in pretty much everything. But it does lead me to say this; Google is not media.
What is Google then? A tool? A platform? An aggregating oracle? The Gutenberg Press of the next millennium?
Personally, I think it most closely resembles a medium. Though this doesn’t exactly fit either, since I think in the technical sense, the Internet is the medium.
One thing is certain, though. As Marshall McLuhan pointed out (for those in the Google generation not… errr… um… experienced enough to have been forced to study this in college, see this great clip I caught the other night from Annie Hall, though you might not have heard of that either), in the grand scheme of things, it is not the content itself, or any single provider of content, that is most responsible for the way people interact with media, or the changes media can bring about, but rather the medium itself.
On that note, the results of the research are clear. Despite our overwhelming love of select media brands to keep us informed and engaged, the medium is still the #1 message. And the message is, at least as far as I’m concerned, I should have bought Google at $95.
