McLuhan, Maslow, the "funnel" are dead: the medium is NOT the message!

I live and breathe the interactive advertising world. Or, otherwise put, the "martec" (marketing technology) world: the CRM, the DM, the database marketing, analytics, etc. etc. And if I hear one more time "the medium is the message", I think I am going to die at the wheel and right before doing so, on this cliff road I am driving fast speed, I will push the passenger door open and kick McLuhan into the void! There are too many ad, client/advertiser execs that repeat ad nausea the good old 50's.

Brace yourselves: with Web 2.0 (and even more so with Web 3.0), the medium is NOT (nor has it ever been) the message! Maslow's pyramid of needs and its close cousing, the inverted funnel, are void abstractions for reasons of making it easy for the average PPT listener to regurgitate easily pseudo-philosophical abstractions at the dinner table.

I am SO glad the web of the future is here: ever since data has started to open and thus separate from its container (the "medium") with SOA, Web Services, Web 2.0, mashups, etc. these good old friends have been proven wrong. But then again, they used to live in an era where newspapers were king. Now look at them! Newspapers are dying, big Content and Media are scrambling for reasons to live, and big Corp has started to spike its baldness in "cooler" colors while still not getting it.

I am happy the consumer is at last king (social networking, YouTube, Facebook, etc.), I am happy the consumer is NOT the consumer anymore but rather the consumer-user-person-individual (CUPI). The inherent "user model" and philosophy on top of which all martec has been built are WRONG: there is no silver bullet (the "awareness-consideration-purchase-loyalty" model is both too simplistic to model how  CUPI  reacts, and doesn't really work anyway); nothing is one-dimensional as both simplistic mental models of martec have us believe - it's rather an intricate relation of nodes moving in a brownian way; and the underlying infrastructure of all martec, the relational database, is dead - if you don't trust me, read Hank's post: Death of the Relational Database.

Everything's connected, but not in just one way; in a  myriad ways that renders the medium dead, and the message king. But the message is king today, in Web 2.0 and beyond, as knowledge composed or mashed-up from data inter-woven and re-woven in those myriad ways, and not hardcoded in the flat relational way, but outside of the data layer, by each and all of us.