Archive for December, 2009
To Bob Garfield: DOOH is not “listenomics”
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on December 23rd, 2009
Bob Garfield’s book The Chaos Scenario (2009: Stielstra Publishing) talks about the dismantling of traditional media at the hands of digital media. For businesses that have relied on TV, radio, and print media to advertise their products and services, the changing landscape means a change in strategy: from talking at consumers to working with them, via social media. Garfield calls the new strategy “listenomics” because it means listening to consumers and engaging them directly. Garfield is co-host of NPR’s On the Media.
All that sounds great. Who wouldn’t want to see one-way communication from advertisers changed to two-way communication between advertisers and consumers? As Garfield says, consumers have made it clear they avoid advertisers whenever they have the chance, so advertisers have only one choice for reaching cosumers in today’s digital age: enaging them in a relationship that respects them.
The story would be beautiful if it ended there but unfortunately it doesn’t.
Speaking at the OVAB Digital Media Summit hosted by the Out-of-Home Video Advertising Bureau, Garfield was quoted in a write-up as saying that advertisers still have one “mass media” option left to them: digital out-of-home (DOOH) media—captive-audience media. As he put it, “Out-of-home is the last great play in the advertising world.” Why? Because consumers “can avoid traditional media, but out-of-home media is the one exception to that.”
Garfield surely realizes out-of-home is the antithesis of the listenomic strategy he introduced to us. Where listenomics means tapping social media to respect consumers, learn their needs, and solve their problems, out-of-home media means bludgeoning consumers with intrusive, invasive content that people haven’t asked for and, what’s worse, they can’t escape without paying a high opportunity cost.
TV on elevators, gas pumps, in the backseat of cabs, on subways, trains, and buses, on street corners—TV and audio media are hard to ignore and impossible to really tune out, even when we think we are. There is nothing respectful or collaborative about captive-audience media. It is far more intrusive than even traditional media, which at least gives its consumers the option to shut them off. With out-of-home media, there are TVs but no Off button.
No doubt Garfield’s message that out-of-home media is the last great advertising play is music to the ears of people at the digital media summit at which he spoke, since they’re in the business of capturing consumers against their will and force-feeding them content that no one has asked for.
But there was one other thing Garfield said that should give anyone in captive-audience media pause, and it was this: “You need to make sure that an irritated consumer doesn’t become an irate consumer.”
I know captive-audience media people say consumers love their content and that we all love nothing more than to have audio-video content pushed out to us against our will, but reality is not quite as pristine as an industry’s privately funded and designed surveys show.
When out-of-home media people talk about “engaging” consumers with their content, their use of the word is Orwellian, to say the least, and I think Garfield should call them on it. An “engagement” isn’t a shotgun marriage; it’s not forcing something onto someone else; an engagement is two people mutually agreeing to something.
Pushing out audio-video content to people while they’re in a subway car or on an elevator is not mutual, it’s not collaborative, its not engaging, and it’s not respectful. I hope the out-of-home media industry has its listening ears on.
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Is TV in public places good or bad? Let us know your thoughts in this Media by Choice survey on the good and the bad of TV in public places such as elevators, taxi cabs, subways, trains, buses, airport gates, doctor’s offices, office and hotel lobbies, and so on. Click here to take survey.
Goodbye, Outside magazine; sorry to let you go
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on December 21st, 2009
When I think of skiing, I think of hearty activity by people who appreciate the outdoors. When their day on the slopes is over, skiers like to get a hot drink and sit by the fire in the lodge. Sounds pretty idyllic, which is why I question the wisdom of Outside magazine destroying that idyllic picture by force-feeding its content to people who just want to relax.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t see anything rustic about sitting around the fireplace having TV content pushed out to you. It’s one thing to go to a sports bar and watch football, but how many of us want to sit around a fireplace in a mountain lodge and be forced to watch TV?
To be sure, if you want to watch TV, you would want that option in your room. But does the common areas of a lodge have to bludgeon everybody with TV content that some might like but no one has asked for?
Apparently Outside magazine just cut a deal with Resort Sports Network to pump in its content to TVs in 110 resorts. The network serves the rooms of resort guests as well as the resorts’ common areas.
Of course people like TV. People like TV so much that the medium has outgrown its place in our living rooms and is moving to every place in which we gather, including mountain resorts. The result is that no place will really be exotic anymore, no place will be a get-away, because every place will be the same: a place for us to sit around and watch TV—even if we don’t want to.
I think Outside magazine—a magazine I’ve long had high regard for—is diminishing itself by partnering with a captive-audience media network. Now, people who resent being made captive to TV they haven’t asked for will focus their resentment on the otherwise fine content of Outside magazine. Is that what the editors want?
Take our survey
Is TV in public places good or bad? Let us know your thoughts in this Media by Choice survey on the good and the bad of TV in public places such as elevators, taxi cabs, subways, trains, buses, airport gates, doctor’s offices, office and hotel lobbies, and so on. Click here to take survey
Parents ratchet up anti-Channel One effort
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on December 8th, 2009
With their victory against BusRadio behind them, the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) is asking parents to help it step up its campaign against the compulsory in-school commercial TV network, Channel One.
If you’re not familiar with the network, it gives school districts audio and video equipment in exchange for the privilege of providing 10 minutes of current events programming and two minutes of age-segmented commercials to a captive audience of school children. The programming itself has been derided as thinly veiled marketing tie-ins that masquerade as hip news and commentary.
Channel One is owned by a marketing company, Alloy Media + Marketing, and according to CCFC the company is being less than upfront to parents about its content. Its Channel One Web site is selective in the compulsory in-school content that it displays for public consumption, giving parents an incomplete picture of what their children are being forced to watch in the classroom.
“The company refuses to make its entire broadcasts available on the Web so that parents can see the advertisements their children are forced to view each school day,” CCFC says.
All types of captive-audience media are morally dubious, in my book, but there’s simply no fig leaf of respectability for in-school commercial audience captivity to hide behind. As Ralph Nader has said, Channel One is simply the most brazen commercial exploitation of our children that’s been devised. Not only is the business model morally compromised, but the schools and the public officials that permit a network like Channel One to operate are compromised as well.
CCFC isn’t the only group fighting Channel One, of course. Commercial Alert has been on the front lines against the network for years, and indeed, a campaign it helped spearhead with many other groups about half a dozen years ago was one of the forces that drove Channel One’s old owner to put the network on the sale block for a discounted price.
That campaign made an appeal to Channel One advertisers to put their marketing money elsewhere, and enough of them did that the network’s old owner considered folding the company—until Alloy came into the picture. You can read about this in my book Noise Wars: Compulsory Media and Our Loss of Autonomy
CCFC and Commercial Alert, among other groups, deserve our appreciation for their tireless work in shutting down BusRadio (compulsory commercial radio on school buses). The company ceased programming a few months ago. The non-profits are now continuing their work against Channel One.
Clearly, the door to our public schools should not be open to a profit-driven private company that exploits mandatory school attendance laws by holding children and teens captive to pseudo public-service programming and cynical consumer manipulation wrapped in the guise of hip, age-segmented commercials. If you agree, I encourage you to offer your help to CCFC, Commercial Alert, and other groups.
Here’s an appeal from CCFC to send it an e-mail if you have a child in a school with Channel One programming:
“If you’re a parent whose child must watch Channel One—or a teacher compelled to show it in your classroom—please let us know by e-mailing ccfc@jbcc.harvard.edu. We won’t share your information with anyone, but from time to time, you’ll get special requests and information from us regarding Channel One. And with your help, we’ll stop Channel One the way we stopped BusRadio.”
Just for fun, there are many anti-Channel One groups on Facebook. Here are just three of them:
I am Being Forced Against My Will to Watch Channel One News
We Want No More Channel One News
Take our survey
Is TV in public places good or bad? Let us know your thoughts in this Media by Choice survey on the good and the bad of TV in public places such as elevators, taxi cabs, subways, trains, buses, airport gates, doctor’s offices, office and hotel lobbies, and so on. Click here to take survey
DOOH suffers from cognitive bias
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise, TV Turnoff on December 4th, 2009
There is an entire field of study on cognitive biases in the way we see things, as individuals and as groups. “Bias blind spot,” “choice-supportive bias,” and “the base rate fallacy” are among the ways we reinforce what we believe and disregard what we don’t believe.
I believe the digital out-of-home media industry—the people who put TVs on trains, buses, subways, taxis, gas station pumps, elevators, office lobbies, and so on— is suffering from a big case of cognitive bias.
At conferences and in research reports, executives and consultants in the DOOH industry (as it’s called in some cases) claim that consumers like captive-audience media—that is, they like audio-video media they haven’t asked for in places where they can’t escape it.
As one executive at a recent conference says (as quoted in an industry report), “Studies consistently show that people do not mind—in fact, ‘invite’ media in out-of-home environments that stimulate them emotionally and intellectually.”
But I believe DOOH executives and consultants have spent too much time reading their own press releases. I have yet to talk to a single person who says they like TV in grocery stores, on gas pumps, in cabs, or in doctor’s offices. At most, they put up with the TV out of the belief that that kind of media is just part of the landscape now. What’s more, whenever consumers are quoted in newspapers and magazines on TVs in restaurants and other out-of-home settings, many of the quotes are typically about how irritating the TVs are. And those are just the polite comments printed in the story. When you read people’s online comments about captive-audience media, the quotes tend to have more exclamation points.
That said, I don’t doubt for a second that the studies being pointed to by DOOH industry people do in fact support their contention that we love being made captive to audio-video media. For a company or an industry to produce studies supporting what they want them to support is a time-honored tradition and something anyone who’s completed Statistics 101 can do. I recall two “studies” that came out within the last three months that show people liking TV in two different types of out-of-home settings (one a retail setting, the other a medical one). I put “studies” in quotes because they came from an independent firm that measures audience traffic but the studies were commissioned by the out-of-home media companies. Um, that means the media companies paid this independent company to “study” whether people like their product. Neither of the press releases that came out mentioned the fact that the studies were paid for. When I called the media contact on one of the press releases to confirm that the study was paid for, the contact threw back questions at me about whether I was media or not rather than just answer my question.
As it is, I have my own study on captive-audience media and after only one day the results show overwhelmingly that people dislike TV in public places.
The study isn’t objective, you say? Well, let’s look at this. The way I spread word about the survey was completely random. I simply tagged the blog page on StumbleUpon, Digg, Delicious, and Reddit. So I have no idea who will find the survey from those sites. I also tweeted about it, but I only have 40 followers, and some of them are just fronts for sites that sell Viagra, I think. There might even be a few DOOH people following me. I know the tweet was re-tweeted once, to a group that seems to have nothing to do with media of any kind. So, that seems pretty random.
Here are results of my survey so far:
* 75% say TV in public places is always or often an unwanted distraction
* 100% say the information on the TV neither helps nor enriches their life
* 100% say they would prefer to get information on specials at a grocery store on printed signs rather than in-house TV
* 75% say TV in public places makes it hard for them to read or think
* 100% say they’d rather read or think in a doctor’s waiting room than watch TV
* 100% say piped-in commercial radio on a publicly subsidized train is a violation of liberty and privacy rights
Those are the factual results from my survey one day after inviting people to voice their views. These results don’t match up with DOOH industry studies. If the different studies are equally factual, what can account for this divergence?
In the DOOH report referenced earlier, called Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) of Digital Signage the author of the report, an industry consultant, listed threats and weaknesses to the DOOH industry. The report does not list people’s dislike of captive-audience media as a threat. My own view is that, as captive-audience media spreads further, people will take notice and at some point many people will say that captive-audience media is going too far.
Do I suffer from cognitive bias? Listen, I’ve got the study to prove my contention.
Survey: is out-of-home TV good, bad, or both?
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise, TV Turnoff on December 3rd, 2009
Many people like having TV in public places. The TVs are a way to pass the time while you’re waiting to catch a flight or eating at a restaurant. Now that out-of-home TV is migrating to many other places—the backseat of taxis, for instance, and to elevators, buses, subways, trains, street corners, office and hotel lobbies, and doctor’s waiting rooms, among others—it’s appropriate to ask whether this is too much.
Some people find out-of-home TV distracting and irritating, at least some of the time. Others find the TVs an invasion of their personal space. After all, the audio and video of TV in a public place washes over everyone indiscriminately. For some people, that’s just not right.
What do you think? Take this 10-question survey and help us get some insight into the good and the bad of out-of-home TV. It only takes two minutes to participate, and it doesn’t ask you to provide any contact or other information.
—R. Freedman
