The Theory of Media Chaos

It has become a bit of an ad industry cliché to wax poetic about accelerating media fragmentation. While certainly valid, I submit that a more meaningful analysis involves the concept of entropy and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.

Stay with me here. The concept is really quite simple.

Entropy, briefly explained, is a measure of disorder. High entropy equates to high disorder—consider it an evolved chaos. According to Wikipedia, the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics states that “the entropy of a system spontaneously evolves towards a configuration with maximum entropy.” Basically, let a system evolve naturally, and it will trend towards an equilibrium of maximum disorder.

My hypothesis is that the media and advertising world is no different. We are headed towards a state of maximum disorder—Media Chaos. The consumer is at the center, and her media consumption choices are infinite, ever-changing, and difficult/impossible to predict.

The internet has a role in this process, but it is not causing it. I’d argue that technology has been on a constant march to accelerate this drive towards pure disorder. From the printing press to the iPhone.

Imagine there are no channels. I wonder if you can.

The idea of Media Chaos is a scary concept for marketers. How do you shift consumer attitudes in the face of an infinite content universe without meaningful order? Chaos is a lot trickier to tame then simple fragmentation.

I don’t think the true answer lies in jamming ads onto every emerging platform. That is likely a fool’s errand in the world of accelerating chaos.

Instead, my hypothesis is that the only hope marketers have in the face of Media Chaos is the smart use of data to help define and deliver experience-led ideas – manifestations of a brand’s purpose that create a certain types of cultural movement within a data-defined target. No small feat, but only the brands who figure it out will thrive beyond these early days of media.