The songs that travel are the songs that survive.
By Jane Meyer, Senior Account Executive & Project Manager
Deep in the pine flatwoods of South Florida, tiny brown birds are running a communications experiment that marketers should know about.
According to a recent piece in The New York Times, Bachman’s sparrows use as many as 120 different song types to communicate. But not all of them make it. Researchers recently discovered that rarer songs degrade more quickly as they move through the birds’ habitat, scattered by vegetation, distorted by wind, and absorbed by dense undergrowth. Common songs travel more clearly. Over generations, young sparrows learn the songs that arrive intact. The degraded ones quietly disappear.
The songs aren’t surviving because they’re inherently better. They’re surviving because the environment allows them to be heard.
Sound familiar?
The Medium is the Message
Back in 1964, Marshall McLuhan famously declared “the medium is the message.” His point wasn’t simply that media carry information. It was that the medium itself shapes how information is understood.
Nature has been demonstrating this long before McLuhan named it. Biologists call it the acoustic adaptation hypothesis: the idea that habitat and climate gradually shape the way animals communicate. Frogs living beside rushing streams develop high-frequency calls that cut through background noise. Monkeys in dense forests rely on lower-frequency vocalizations that travel through the canopy.
Every environment rewards certain signals and filters out others.
Channel is a Creative Decision
Strategy Consultant Julian Cole asks a simple question: “Where is the moment of maximum receptivity?” It’s a question about the audience, not the message. Not what are we saying, but when and where is someone actually ready to hear it.
Regardless of how your creative process unfolds, every idea eventually meets the same reality: the environment in which it’s received.
A headline that works beautifully in a printed brochure loses impact on a tradeshow banner thirty feet away. A carefully-crafted subject line competes with dozens of unread emails on a phone. Copy written for a narrated video loses its punch when it appears in a silent social feed.
The message didn’t necessarily fail. The environment merely edited it.
Designing for the Environment
Channel strategy is often taken for granted, even though every idea has to survive it.
Spotify Wrapped is a great example. The campaign isn’t memorable simply because the creative idea is strong. It’s memorable because the idea and the environment reinforce one another. Personal listening data becomes visual, shareable and timely, making it perfectly suited to the way people already behave on social media platforms.
The message wasn’t merely placed in a channel. It was designed to thrive there.
That’s a different way of thinking about communication. Instead of treating channels as containers for finished ideas, we should think of them as environments that shape how those ideas are experienced.
The Songs That Travel
The sparrow researchers were careful not to overstate their findings. Acoustic clarity is, as one scientist put it, “one small piece of a big puzzle.” Social dynamics, learned behavior and other environmental factors also influence which songs endure.
Marketing works the same way.
No campaign succeeds because of one variable. Great communication is a convergence of factors: the strength of the idea, the audience, the timing, and the medium through which it travels. Ignore any one of them and you’re singing into the wind. Literally, in the sparrow’s case.
The Bachman’s sparrow doesn’t know it’s doing communications strategy. It’s simply responding to what its environment rewards. After thousands of years, the songs that travel are the songs that survive.
We don’t have thousands of years, but we do face the same basic challenge: a noisy environment, a limited window, and a message that either travels or doesn’t.
Build accordingly.
Rasor creates award-winning messages that travel. We are a Cincinnati-based marketing agency delivering communications, design, and public relations strategies to industries including healthcare, municipal and infrastructure, and B2B/B2C. Contact us at info@gorasor.com or 513-793-1234 – we’d love to connect.