You Can’t Count on the Medium Being the Novelty for Long

After a meeting this morning I slipped into a nearby shopping center and my phone beeped. Did I want to receive a message via Bluetooth? Sure.  I clicked yes. And a second later the message appeared.

The message turned out to be a video.

The message was the following video. A little ad announcing sales at the shopping center. That the ad looked like a game of Tetris was the only acknowledgment of the mobile experience (you know, people play Tetris on their phones). In every other way the ad did NOTHING to work with the specifics of the fact that here was somebody interacting in a public commercial space. It was hard to hear the music while I was in the mall. The ad told me nothing a sign in the mall couldn’t tell me. It did not pull me into anything deeper.

There was nothing interesting about the content.

The only interesting thing was the novelty of the medium itself — delivery of video to a phone via a personal area network. And anyway… this interest in the medium probably only applies to early-adopting tinkerers who aren’t too freaked out about privacy.

The fact is that for tinkerers and everybody else, if businesses don’t start delivering interesting, MEDIUM- AND EXPERIENCE-APPROPRIATE content people will soon stop accepting the messages.

Here’s the video: