It is fair to say that the media business is changing beneath our feet as we walk into the office each day. But it is also fair to say that the more things change, the more they stay the same.

It doesn’t matter whether I am reading a document about Cross Channel Attribution from AOL Platforms or attending a seminar featuring a speaker who is one of the world’s leading media advisers, one thing that remains unchanged is the all-too-common misuse of the word mediums when referring to the plural of medium as in “Television is an advertising medium”….. Television and Radio are broadcast mediums. WRONG! Television and radio are broadcast MEDIA.

True, if you look it up in Oxford or Merriam Webster dictionaries, you’ll find:

medium Line breaks: me¦dium

Pronunciation: /ˈmiːdɪəm

Definition of medium in English: noun (plural media or mediums)

But read further…you’ll find that Mediums is the plural for medium the soothsayer kind, not medium the advertising type!

(plural mediums) A person claiming to be in contact with the spirits of the dead and to communicate between the dead and the living.

Example sentences
• Such beliefs are not confined to rural areas; in the cities there is a network of spirit mediums who claim to contact the dead.
• This work, by Professor Richard Wiseman, involved asking five mediums to contact the dead relatives of five volunteers.
• He asserts that this work supports the mediums ‘ claims that they are actually communicating with the dead.

While one could intelligently argue that more than half of the media impressions we buy are simply not there, below the fold, out of the room, otherwise occupied, I am relatively certain that advertising media has little to do with communicating with the dead. So please do me and yourself a favour by using the correct term for the plural of medium: media!