July 5, 2026
THE DAILY McLUHAN DIALOGUES™ • McDialogues™
Understanding the Grammars of Electric Culture and Propaganda Science™
An Exploration of Technology Ecology as an Anchor in a Sea of Change™ and Tactical Training in Counter-Propaganda Science™
Nelson S. Thall, McLuhan Media Scientist, Former President/Director/Chief Archivist, Marshall McLuhan Centre On Global Communications, Toronto, Canada.
The Metering of Emotion
When the Ad Man Became a Machine
A Student of Technology asks:
Mr. Thall, advertisers at this year's World Cup used an Artificial Intelligence system that analyzed the emotional tone of whatever people were watching or reading, then placed advertisements at the moments of highest feeling. Brand awareness reportedly rose 94 percent. But advertisers have always aimed at our emotions. Has anything really changed?
Nelson S. Thall replies:
In the aim, nothing has changed. Advertising has always read emotion, and always the oldest kind. The oldest appeal is nourishment. The newborn is not taught to seek the mother's breast; the rooting and sucking reflexes are built into the nervous system because survival depends upon them. Throughout life the breast remains associated with comfort and nourishment, and advertisers have pressed that button since the first soap poster. Marshall McLuhan catalogued the whole gallery in The Mechanical Bride in 1951: the ad page's ceaseless traffic in the body, the fusion of sex, food, and machine. Advertisers never needed neuroscientists to tell them that feeling opens the door argument cannot. They have known it, and used it, from the beginning.
What has changed is the instrument. The old ad man read the public's emotions the way a fisherman reads the weather: by craft, intuition, and the accumulated wisdom of experience, one campaign at a time. The new ad man is a high-speed pattern-recognition machine that reads the emotional tone of the entire electric environment continuously and predicts the feeling of the multitude before the multitude has finished feeling it. During the World Cup, with billions of nervous systems firing in unison, the machine metered the collective mood and dispatched messages into the moments of maximum openness. Feeling has become inventory. The craft has become radar. Whatever can be measured can eventually be managed, and whatever can be managed can ultimately be automated.
And the meter reads clearly because the man has become so readable. As I explain in my yet to be published book Technotrap, electric man is discarnate, sent everywhere at the speed of light, minus his body, and the discarnate man has slid from the dominance of the visual sense to the dominance of the proprioceptive sense. He lives in the world of the amoeba: no distance, no detachment, no inspecting eye. Only what can be felt impinges on his reality button. The machine did not invent emotional advertising, and it did not create his condition. It merely industrialized the one and took the first planetary measurement of the other. For the first time in history, feeling itself has become a measurable utility. We once measured electricity, gas, and water because they powered our homes. Now emotion is measured because it powers commerce. When emotion becomes infrastructure, humanity itself becomes the resource being mined. The meter has become the message.
All intellectual property contained herein was conceived, originated and authored exclusively by Nelson S. Thall. Artificial intelligence aka a pseudo-conscious machine (PCM) was not employed. We hired a stenographer. No intellectual contribution or creative authorship is attributed to the AI tool. All rights of authorship and ownership vest entirely and exclusively with Nelson S. Thall.
I can be reached at nelson@themediumisthemessage.com
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