After the record's release, Columbia organized an elaborate promotional plan, involving advertisements in an eclectic array of publications and a unique campaign which saw female models in miniskirts outside media centres in American cities carrying posters of the album and giving free copies to passers-by.

[7] According to author Phil Ford, Simon clearly wanted the record to "represent the subjective experience of human beings in the media age that McLuhan envisioned–a total immersion in discontinuous, simultaneous, and rapidly changing multisensory inputs."

[9] In music writer Oliver Wang's description, the record was created by "taking a razor to hundreds of yards of reel-to-reel tape, spliced and overdubbed together in chaotic permutations".

[10] Simon scored the musical interludes, manipulated hundreds of audio snippets and arranged them with liberal use of stereo effects, with juxtaposed, overlapping samples appearing in opposite channels.

"[2] The record's use of "cut-up sound collage" channels what Kitnick calls "a developing sense of allatonceness" and highlights the significance of auditory space to McLuhan's theories.

"[3] Sound excerpts that can be heard among the album's 'cacophony' include a reading of Homer's Iliad, snippets of jazz, broken pottery and chirping birds.

[12] To promote the album following its release, the label devised an unusual, diversified advertising campaign; Columbia's general manager, Clive Davis, stated that The Medium is the Massage is "an innovation in recording.

[2] In their contemporary review, Billboard called it "an unusual record" that interweaves, repeats and satirizes its sounds, messages and music, and commented that McLuhan's popularity in literary circles has the potential to secure strong sales for the album, adding that it would appeal to "the campus crowd".

[19] Another reviewer, Douglas Watt of the Daily News, dubbed it a record version of McLuhan's and Fiore's "souped-up" book, with the two authors reading excerpts "with other voices and all kind of sound-effects participating.

"[20] The album received Top 40 airplay in Boston, Los Angeles, San Francisco and St. Louis,[17] while its trippy style ensured that it was a fixture on FM radio in the late 1960s.

[4] John Benson Brooks, whose similar album Avant Slant was still in production when Massage was released, expressed his annoyance in July 1967, saying of McLuhan's record: "not bad, but not very good either.

[7] According to Milano, the album's "disorienting production style" and "similar surreal humor" soon appeared on Frank Zappa's Lumpy Gravy (1968), the Monkees' Head (1968), the Beatles' "Revolution 9" (1968) and the "entire catalog" of the Firesign Theatre.

He considered it an achievement of analog-era editing but "also a stunningly prescient sonic prediction of the coming 'noise' of the Information Age, where the austere, professorial voice of authority must contend with a constant barrage of old and new media intruding.