Dec
4
Credibility: It’s the medium stupid!
December 4, 2008
Despite your political leanings, Stephan Dion and the Liberal party taught us an important lesson this week. The medium IS the message.
The absolute horribly produced video that was sent to the press gallery to be distributed to the networks represented a comical string of errors worthy of the Keystone Cops. The video arrived late, was in the wrong format, the composition of the video was well below the quality seen on many amateur YouTube videos, and the quality caused people to speculate that it was shot on a camera phone.
This caused people at the water cooler and the media to talk about the poor quality of the video rather than the message itself.
Research at Stanford University’s Persuasive Technology Lab indicate that people judge the credibility of a message based on the quality of the medium — be it a visual cue, quality, aethstetics, etc. If this is the case, and it certainly seems to bear out in my experience, Dion very well could have done even more damage to himself and to the rest of the party.
The lesson to be learned here is this —pay absolute attention to the quality of the media you are using. Make sure the design works, make sure the aesthetics support your branding and positioning, and make sure that when you do present something to the public that it actually helps your cause rather than hurt it.
And now the video in question (it looked much worse on TV than on YouTube):
Of course, this isn’t the first video to hurt Dion’s credibility:
Tags: Brand Experience Stuff, Design Stuff, Experience Design Stuff
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