For the TV Generation, Multimedia Techniques Bombard and Overload the Senses for Fun and Profit
"Multimedia: Massaging Senses for the Message New Mode of Communicating Uses Jarring Combination of Sights and Sounds"
A new method of communication is developing in our society—the technique of multimedia.
Its jarring combinations of stimuli—sounds, lights, colors, smells and moving images—aim at reaching audiences by a supersaturated attack on all the senses, not just eye or ear. The multimedia technique is helping to convey information, provide entertainment, create esthetic experience, sell products and even further medical research.
A recent string of successful sales meetings held by the Scott Paper Company—sales have increased 11 per cent—imbued salesmen with the Scott "message" not by means of the standard song-and-dance industrial show, but with the aid of rock ' n' roll music, slide and movie projections and a battery of pulsing strobe lights.
Intermedia was conceived by John Brockman, a 26-year-old alumnae of the Columbia School of Business Administration who is in close touch with the artists and filmmakers' underground. His one-man company, John Brockman Associates, serves as a liasion between artists involved with intermedia and the many worlds that want to make use of it.
Mr. Brockman specializes in what he calls "intermedia kinetic environments"—multi-channel sound and light shows that encourage total audience participation. Last winter, he was hired to produce such an environment by Matt Levine, an old school friend and product manager of a Scott division lagging in sales. Its product was Confidets, a sanitary napkin.