Saturday, February 3, 2007

someday my toaster will read me the news

A few months ago, my 17-year-old brother stood in line all night to ensure he was one of the first owners of the long-awaited Nintendo Wii. If you have not yet had a chance to dabble in the excitement of this interactive gaming system, I recommend you give it a try. My brother conned his non-gaming sister who barely knows which way to hold the controller into playing one day, and to my surprise I found it quite fun. For me, Wii bowling proved more fun than actual bowling, probably because I seemed slightly better at it than when I bowl in real life.

Last week, MediaPost's Marketing Daily published a very interesting article about Nintendo's Wii. According to the article, Nintendo plans to make news from AP available through the Wii. To me, this sounds like an avenue to entice tuned-out youths to get into the news. Although definitely not foolproof, I think those of us in the communications field need to acknowledge new, innovative ways of getting our message across to our publics. We know that if you want to want to reach your audience, you must go to them- relying on them to find to you usually fails to achieve much success. So if our audiences start TiVoing through commercials and watching YouTube rather than the news, we will just need to upload our message to YouTube to keep up.

For a communications profession like public relations, this translates into message appeal. Obviously your message itself must appeal to your audience, but you reach your audience more successfully if your message comes though an appealing medium as well. In the case of those crazy young whippersnappers, they might actually read it.

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