Imagine You Proposed Marriage Over a Traffic Announcement.
What that has to do with your CPaaS strategy is going to bother you for a while.
A man decides to propose to his partner. He has thought about it for months. He knows exactly what he wants to say. The words are perfect. The feeling is genuine. The intention is real.
So he books the city's public announcement system.
At 8:47am on a Tuesday — between the traffic update for the eastern highway and a reminder about alternate side parking — his voice crackles through every speaker in the city.
"Priya. Will you marry me?"
Four million people hear it. Priya hears it. Surrounded by strangers on a bus. Holding her morning chai. Nowhere to look. Nowhere to go.
The message was delivered. The delivery rate was 100%.
The answer was no.
The Idea That Explains Everything and Has Been Ignored for Sixty Years
In 1964, a Canadian communication theorist named Marshall McLuhan published a book that contained one sentence the entire marketing industry has been ignoring ever since.
"The medium is the message."
McLuhan's insight was that the characteristics of a communication medium shape societal structures and individual perceptions more profoundly than the content conveyed through it.
Plain language: the channel is not the container for the message. The channel IS the message. Before a single word is read, the brain has already processed what medium it arrived through — what that medium means, what it has historically signified, what emotional register it carries, what level of intimacy it implies.
A marriage proposal arriving through a city-wide public announcement system does not fail because the words were wrong. It fails because the medium announced to four million people that this message was not private, not intimate, not chosen specifically for the person receiving it.
The medium said everything before the words began.
How many times has your brand done exactly this?
Not with a marriage proposal. With a renewal reminder sent through WhatsApp at 9am — a channel the customer associates with personal conversation — carrying the same copy as the email sent an hour earlier. With an SMS that borrowed the brain's urgency response to announce a Tuesday sale. With an RCS campaign that used a stage-level medium to deliver a message that deserved a whisper.
The delivery rate was 100%.
The medium said the wrong thing before the message started.
The Three Characters Every Brand Becomes — Without Knowing It
McLuhan's insight does not just describe individual campaigns. It describes the entire philosophy — or absence of one — with which brands approach their communication channels.
Most brands fall into one of three characters.
The Announcer
This brand treats every channel like a public address system. WhatsApp, SMS, email — all of them carry the same promotional broadcast to the same list at the same time. The tone is identical. The content is identical. The only difference is the icon on the notification.
The Announcer never asked what the medium was saying. They only asked whether it was delivering.
McLuhan's answer: it was delivering the wrong message from the first notification. The medium announced — through its very nature — that nobody thought carefully about which channel this moment deserved. The customer's brain processed that signal before reading a word.
The Announcer's favourite metric: sends per month.
The metric that tells the real story: response rate trend over six months.
The Collector
This brand has tools. Many tools.
A customer data platform. A marketing automation suite. An ESP. A WhatsApp Business API integration. An SMS gateway. A journey builder. An analytics dashboard. An AI layer added because a competitor announced one.
The Collector spent eight months implementing this stack. The vendor promised transformation. The dashboard is genuinely beautiful.
What the Collector actually uses: email. Sent on Tuesdays. To the full list.
The medium's effects are the result of form more than of content. The Collector understood content. They never asked what form they were using — and what that form was communicating to the customer before the content arrived.
The Collector's favourite moment: the procurement approval.
The moment that tells the real story: six months after go-live, when the CSM starts sending check-in emails nobody fully answers.
The Optimiser
This brand is sophisticated. They A/B test subject lines. They have send-time optimisation enabled. They segment carefully. They know their open rate to two decimal places.
They are very, very good at optimising the message inside a medium they never questioned.
McLuhan would say: you are perfecting the words of the traffic announcement. The proposal still fails. Because the question is not whether the message is better. The question is whether the medium was right for this moment — and that question was never asked.
The Optimiser's favourite question: "What should we change about the campaign?"
The question that tells the real story: "Should we be sending on this channel at all?"
What Each Channel's Medium Is Actually Saying
This is where McLuhan's thesis does its most direct practical work.
Every channel in your CPaaS stack carries a medium-level message that arrives before your campaign content. Understanding what each medium communicates — independent of what you place inside it — is the foundation of a channel philosophy.
All media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways. Each channel has accumulated a distinct emotional register through years of how it has been used. That register is the medium's message.
Email is considered and asynchronous. The customer chooses when to engage. The medium says: "this is a correspondence — something you can read when you are ready." It supports longer, more considered communication. A brand that sends a brief, casual message in email is fighting the medium's natural register. A brand that sends a considered, valuable piece of communication is using the medium as it was built to be used.
WhatsApp is intimate and synchronous in feel. The medium itself, not the messages it carries, should be the primary focus of study. WhatsApp's medium says: "this is a personal space — the same application where this person talks to the people they care about most." That intimacy is not a feature. It is the medium's fundamental message. A brand that sends a promotional broadcast through WhatsApp is not just delivering an unwanted message. The medium is announcing that the brand believes a living room is an appropriate place to unfurl a catalogue.
SMS carries thirty years of accumulated urgency. The medium says: "something important is happening right now." Every OTP, every fraud alert, every genuine emergency that has ever arrived via SMS has built that signal. A brand that sends a Tuesday promotion through SMS is spending the urgency budget of thirty years of appropriate use on something that did not warrant it. The next time a genuine emergency arrives — the medium has been cheapened.
RCS is an interactive stage. The medium says: "this is an experience — something you can engage with, respond to, transact within." A brand that uses RCS to send a static text message is standing on a stage and whispering. The medium promises more than the message delivers. The customer feels the gap even if they cannot name it.
This is what McLuhan meant. The medium is not the container for the message. It is the message. And every brand running the same content across four channels is sending four different messages — none of which they wrote.
Three Questions Before Every Send
Most brands ask one question before selecting a channel: "which channel has the highest reach for this audience?"
McLuhan's framework suggests three different questions entirely.
Question 1 — What is this medium already saying?
Before placing any content in any channel — name what the medium communicates by its mere presence. What has this channel trained the customer's brain to expect? What emotional register does it carry? Is the content you are about to send consistent with what the medium is already announcing?
Question 2 — What does this moment require?
Not what does the campaign calendar require. What does this specific customer, in their current state, in their relationship with this brand, need from this communication? Is it a considered letter? A brief intimate update? An urgent alert? An interactive experience? Name the requirement before selecting the medium.
Question 3 — Is there a mismatch?
If the medium's natural message and the content's intended message are pointing in different directions — the medium wins. Every time. McLuhan was clear on this: the personal and social consequences of any medium result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves. The consequence of using the wrong medium is not just an underperforming campaign. It is a message the customer received — clearly, immediately, below conscious thought — that this brand does not think carefully about how it communicates.
That message compounds. Every send reinforces it.
The Proposal That Could Have Worked
The man who booked the traffic announcement was not wrong about his intention. He was not wrong about his words. He was wrong about one thing.
He chose a medium that communicated — to four million people simultaneously — the opposite of what a marriage proposal requires.
The right medium for a marriage proposal is private. Chosen. Present. It creates the conditions for genuine response — not the conditions for public exposure.
The right medium for your customer communication does the same thing. It creates the conditions for the response you need — not the conditions that feel efficient from a sending infrastructure perspective.
CPaaS done correctly is not a reach infrastructure.
It is a moment infrastructure.
Every channel in your stack was built for a specific kind of moment. Email for considered moments. WhatsApp for intimate ones. SMS for urgent ones. RCS for interactive ones. The brand that matches medium to moment — consistently, deliberately, as a philosophy rather than a calendar decision — is the brand whose communication compounds.
The customer did not stop listening.
They stopped expecting anything worth hearing.
The medium told them, repeatedly, that nothing worth hearing was coming.
That is a fixable problem. But it cannot be fixed with a better subject line or a higher send frequency.
The medium is the message. The proposal deserved a medium that could carry it.
So does your customer.
If your brain is already triaging this page for a 5-second window, skip the reading—the complete narrative is perfectly laid out in the infographic below.
Published by Hetvabhas — independent analysis of brand communication
No vendor agenda. No sponsored content. No false reasoning.
