Archive for January, 2010
Noise Wars review looks at privacy, audience captivity
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on January 28th, 2010
Do we have a constitutional right to privacy? Since 1965 the U.S Supreme Court has built a trail of case law saying a right to privacy is enshrined in the concept of “liberty” in the Fifth Amendment (“nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law”).
The 1965 case that started this trail going was Griswold v. Connecticut, which said people’s right to privacy protects against government prohibition of their use of contraception in their home.
Thanks to a review of my book Noise Wars
The case was Public Utilities Commission v. Pollak and involved the piping-in of commercial radio on a commuter train in Washington, D.C., in the early 1950s. People objected to being made a captive audience to media that they couldn’t ignore or tune out, but the court ruled that riders had given their tacit approval of the media by boarding the train.
In his dissent, Douglas said many people had no choice but to take the train. But, more fundamentally, the force-feeding of content that people can’t ignore constitutes a violation of their liberty, which includes their right to privacy.
Douglas’ dissent is essential reading for anyone concerned about the proliferation of captive-audience media, but the fact remains that he failed in his attempt to enshrine the idea of privacy as a subset of our right to liberty in the case.
But he did succeed about a decade later, in Griswold, and as the reviewers at Legal Legacy say, it’s an interesting question to look at how the post-Griswold right to privacy interacts with the idea of audience captivity.
The Supreme Court has already said that government has the right, without violating people’s right to free speech, to regulate the force-feeding of intrusive content. That right was established a few years prior to the commuter train case when the Supreme Court in Kovacs v. Cooper said it was OK for a city to impose a ban on audio trucks (trucks that drive around blaring audio content from a speaker).
Thanks to Legal Legacy for such a thought-provoking review of Noise Wars.
Out-of-home TV: blight on steroids
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on January 15th, 2010
Researchers say we’re biologically conditioned to look at and listen to sudden changes in our environment, so we always turn to things that move and make noise.
This involuntary attention kept us alive when the evolutionary competition between us and big, hungry cats was more equal. But today, the big cats are in the zoo and in their place we have a big, hungry industry that does nothing all day except find ways to tweak our involuntary attention so they can sell us things or otherwise push their message out to us.
First it was print advertising, including billboards, and now it’s out-of-home TV and other audio-video media.
A lot of people intensely dislike the way we’ve blanketed our public space with print ads, but, for better or for worse, that’s a condition to which most people have reconciled themselves. The ads don’t move and make noise for the most part, so we can share our public space with them and still concentrate on the things we want to concentrate on; they’re not constantly pushing our involuntary-attention button or exciting our orienting response, another term from researchers on involuntary attention.
But now the scene changes to the coming era of out-of-home TV, in which our public space is turned over to screens, big and small, silent and noisy, and we have to ask ourselves whether we will reach a quality-of-life tipping point, because audio-video media is not a simple extension of print media; rather, it flips our relationship with media on its head and changes completely how we consume information.
As Jordan Seiler of Public Ad Campaign puts it, “Advertising’s ability to hold our attention while we try to focus on what we as individuals consider important about the space we are moving through is a theft of our consciousness.” Public Ad Campaign is a group that likes to turn the tables on media companies by using their own bag of tricks aganst them.
Audio-video media is what I like to call “push” media: it pushes out to us without regard to our desire to consume it; print media is what I like to call “pull” media: it must pull us in before we consume its content. If it doesn’t compel, it doesn’t sell, I guess you could say.
In a world in which our public space is commandeered by audio-video “push” media, our ability to focus on the things we want to focus on is in a constant battle with those things that tweak our biological involuntary-attention button: screens whose formal attributes—edits, pans, zooms, bursts of sound—make us look and listen whether we want to or not.
Executives and consultants in the out-of-home media industry use all sorts of semantic needle threading to make it seem like the content on their screens is there for us to consume if we choose. They call it “intentional” media and things like that, and they pay companies to survey people so they can show how much we like their media. And they talk about the importance of content, so they can point to the content’s relevance to our lives and in that way suggest that the content isn’t forced on us.
The industry is surely going to succeed, but when our cities start to resemble Las Vegas and only the wealthy can afford to spend time in places that don’t look like a sports bar, the battle for control of our attention will be every bit as nasty as the battle between us and big, hungry cats.
3,500 say no to audience captivity at the movies
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on January 14th, 2010
Everyone has a story about the annoying person with the cell phone. You’re trying to have a nice dinner or watch a movie at the theater and there’s this inconsiderate person ruining the experience for others by talking on his cell phone, as if the laws of civility don’t apply to him.
In the same manner, everyone has a story about how much they dislike commercials at the movies. Of all the types of audience captivity that people dislike, commercials at the movies is one that is nearly universally shared.
So I’m not surprised to learn about the Captive Motion Picture Audience of America.
CMPAA sounds like a group but its really an effort, or objective, to make executives at movie theaters understand that pre-movie ads alienate their customers.
Of course, executives at movie theaters have no intention of eliminating their ads, just as executives involved in other types of captive-audience platforms—TVs on gas pumps, in elevators, on trains and buses, even in restrooms—have no intention of eliminating theirs.
It’s worth asking why these media executives don’t recognize that a significant portion of consumers resent and take offense at having their involuntary-attention button pushed by being made captive to audio-video media they haven’t asked for.
But be that as it may, CMPAA has had mixed success in its effort to get theater owners to do the right thing.
It can take some satisfaction in a move, led by Loews in 2005, to start publicizing more information about the starting times of its movies. It’s safe to say that Loews’ decision wasn’t because the company suddenly questioned its tactic of force-feeding commercials to consumers in a venue that they had paid to be in; it’s more likely a class-action lawsuit against it and a flurry of bills in state legislatures had changed its thinking.
Both the lawsuit and the bills weren’t about stopping pre-movie ads but empowering consumers to decide whether or not they wanted to sit through them. To remove this albatross from around its neck, Loews started disclosing the actual start time of its movies rather than, as had been its practice, the start time of the ads.
Once the company made that move, the class-action lawsuit on behalf of movie-goers who took offense at being made captive to ads became moot and was dismissed. Same thing with the state legislative efforts.
CMPAA would still like to see pre-movie ads gone, though, and it maintains a petition for people to sign calling for their outright elimination. The petition singles out Regal Entertainment Group, which CMPAA says has a near-monopoly on first-run movies throughout the United States. 3,500 people had signed it as of this writing.
Here’s what some of them say:
“I’ve stopped going to movies because of the commercials.”
“Greed gone insane!”
“We are fed up with paying for movies only to be held ‘captive’ watching advertising. We have decided to stop going to movies until this scam is stopped.”
“Everyone hates your ads, so please stop.”
“I will stop giving them my business if they don’t stop.”
Can anything be more clear? What’s unfortunate is this kind of outrage is only set to grow as executives continue to push intrusive TV and other audio-video media into places outside the home where people can’t escape it. No matter what the content, the resentment will only build. Do we have to let this train wreck happen?
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.
Out-of-home media and shotgun weddings
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on January 10th, 2010
Audience engagement is one of the subjects always under discussion among media people involved in digital out-of-home audio-video media, what we call captive-audience media in this blog because it involves intrusive content pushed out to people who haven’t asked for it.
Media executives typically tout studies they’ve commissioned showing how much their content engages people, and they deploy cool words like “trafficking,” “aggregation,” and “lifestage” in talking about out-of-home media.
I always get suspicious when companies use words like “media currency,” “thought leading,” and “psychographic” to talk about what they’re doing, because words like that are meant to obscure, not enlighten, kind of like the military using “vertical insertion” to talk about commandos parachuting behind enemy lives or “decommissioned aggressor quantum” to talk about dead enemy soldiers.
In their press releases and white papers, captive-audience media companies tout how much people notice and are engaged by their content. The “notice” part I can understand, because biologically we can’t help but notice moving pictures on a screen, especially when coupled with audio. Researchers say this media commands our “involuntary attention” in the same way that a leopard sneaking through the grass in the serengeti involuntarily attracts our attention when we’re out there hunting and gathering. Focusing on things that move and make noise around us has helped us survive as a species, and now it’s helping media companies launch platforms that attract advertisers.
The “engaged” part I’m not so sure about. Yes, I know there are impressive looking reports and stuff out there showing how much captive-audience TV networks like the one in Wal-Mart please us, but I’m just not sure “engaged” means the same thing to me as to a media executive who’s trying to convince advertisers that these plaforms are a good thing.
Here’s a quick quiz. Is the person below, who talks about buying flannel sheets at Wal-Mart, engaged?
“The Wal-Mart I went to has television screens hanging from the ceiling throughout the store. Every single one is playing commercials for items you can buy at Wal-Mart. They all have the sound turned on . . . . Even at the cash register, while still waiting on line, a flat screen TV pointed at the line played a different stream of commercials, conflicting with the nearby ceiling television. . . . I guess I get what I deserve for shopping there. These advertisements were in annoying places. (I did get a measure of revenge, however. While walking past the electronics department, I used my TV-B-Gone to turn off half a bank of televisions on display. It was unfortunate that my TV-B-Gone wouldn’t shut off any of the ceiling TVs.)”—Maria Langer
Maria has definitely noticed the TVs. But is she engaged?
How about this person?
“Those damn TVs are one of the biggest reasons I avoid going in [Wal-Mart]. The whole damn store is loud and makes me very irritable. . . . I’ll pay a couple extra cents for peace.” –ib
In my book, engagement occurs only when two parties mutually and willingly come together, as in an engagement for marriage.
Wal-Mart TV strikes me as invoving a different kind of engagement—the kind in which my girlfriend’s father is pointing a shotgun at me. I guess in this case I’ll enter into an engagement with her.
Wal-Mart’s free to do whatever it wants, of course. But there’s engagement and then there’s bludgeoning. When I turn on the TV at home and choose to watch a program, I’m engaged with the content; when I step into a Wal-Mart to buy flannel sheets and have my involuntary-attention button pushed, I’m bludgeoned by the content.
One industry analyst calls out-of-home media “imperative” media. In a report that mentions his remarks, “imperative” media is defined as media that garners and compels attention when presented at “points of intention.”
You could write an essay unpacking those terms, but the short of it is, in my opinion, the terms are gobbeldygook for media that pushes your involuntary-attention button. Industry supporters can talk in circles around the issue all they want, but all they’re really saying is, you’re going to consume this content whether you want to or not, and we’re going to couch it in business jargon to give the impression that somehow you’ve made a choice to consume it.
You go to Wal-Mart to buy flannel sheets, not watch TV commercials. The TV commercials are the price you pay to get the discount or the selection or the convenience or whatever else Wal-Mart offers, so your only choice is whether you’re willing to pay that price. If you choose not to pay that price, the opportunity cost falls on you to find some other place at which to buy your sheets.
I can’t speak for Maria, but I think there’s a good chance she’ll be willing to pay that opportunity cost to buy her flannel sheets somewhere else next time.
Note: Media by Choice has been online for 10 months now and has generated 11,270 views, or 1,127 views a month on average. The top two posts are On noise, a judge who gets it (2,661 views) and Boom cars: the constitutionality of nose thumbing (1,598 views). Thank you to all of our readers.
Media by Choice Thanks Rep. Eshoo on Noisy TV Bill
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on January 9th, 2010
Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) is leading the way against captive-audience media by championing the successful House bill to curb loud TV commercials, Media by Choice says in a letter to Rep. Eshoo thanking her for her leadership on the issue.
“The practice of media companies to hit viewers over the head with loud commercials is part and parcel with their practice of locating TV and other audio-video media in places where people can’t escape it,” Media by Choice says in its letter on H.R. 1084, the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act.
Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), sponsor of CALM Act
CALM passed the House last week and a similar bill is under consideration in the Senate. The bill directs the Federal Communicatons Commission to develop rules prohibiting media companies from broadcasting commercials at a volume louder than the accompanying programming.
Although TVs in the home is not a form of captive-audience media, because people choose when they watch TV, if at all, the practice of broadcasting commercials at a far higher volume than the accompanying programming has the effect of taking away people’s control of the media they consume and how they consume it.
By forcing people to turn down the volume or hit the mute button at commercial breaks, or else just put up with the intrusion, the media companies are exploiting technology to force-feed content to people, leaving them with only a negative choice: either block the content or try to tune it out.
Rep. Eshoo’s successful bill shows there’s a growing recognition of captive-audience media and a willingness to curb it.
“Your leadership on this issue has shown that our representatives in Congress can come together to curb the abusive use of media technology,” Media by Choice says in its letter. “I hope you’ll continue to lead as the practice of captive-audience media spreads throughout our environment.”
Federal TV Noise Bill Clears Hurdle
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on January 7th, 2010
In a major advancement against noisy TV, the U.S. House of Representatives passed legislation to force media companies to stop playing games with people and turn down the volume of commercials.
Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), sponsor of CALM Act
From the point of view of this blog, TV in people’s houses is not captive-audience media: viewers choose when they watch TV, if at all. But the practice by media companies to hit viewers over the head with loud commercials is part and parcel with the practice of locating audio-video media in places where people can’t escape it: elevators, trains, taxicabs, street corners, bus stops, even restrooms.
The spirit of the practice is to take away people’s control of the media they consume and how they consume it. By forcing people to turn down the volume or hit the mute button at commercial breaks, or else just put up with the noise, the media companies are exploiting technology to force-feed content to people and leave people with only a negative choice: accept it or block it.
The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act, H.R. 1084, in the government’s official summary, “would require the Federal Communications Commission to prescribe a standard to preclude commercials from being broadcast at louder volumes than the program material they accompany.”
This bill has been in the works for several years and I looked into it when was writing Noise Wars.
Of course, the moderate approach of the bill didn’t stop a handful of members of the Energy and Commerce Committee from dissenting in the House report on the bill. About a dozen of the committee members said it would be hard for media companies to implement and that the recent digital TV law already addresses the issue. But all the digital TV law does is map out a protocol for media companies to address the issue voluntarily as part of a larger effort to produce accepted standards of audio production. Given media companies’ track record on captive-audience media, something tells me the only voluntary standards that will be agreed to are those that result in the most sales for their advertisers.
In my view, it’s this same deference to advertisers that’s behind CNN’s patronizing attitude toward the bill. In it’s report on the House vote, the media company quoted two analysts whose focus wasn’t on the success of the bill but how small and insignificant it is. “When Congress can’t solve big problems like Iraq and Afghanistan and 10 percent unemployment and how to implement this health care bill they are trying to pass, they turn to small problems like blasting television commercials,” John Ashford, a political consultant, is quoted as saying.
“This is a dumb bill but I love it. I really do,” media analyst Mark Hughes is quoted as saying.
CNN can say it’s just quoting these analysts, but in journalism, editors decide how a story should be angled, what questions should be asked, and who gets quoted and who doesn’t. That CNN chose to make the bill’s passage seem quaint rather than significant is an editorial decision and its coverage of the issue was dismissive.
In fact, Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) is to be commended for not only getting the bill through the House but for getting 90 other House members to sign on as cosponsors. I can say with certainty that anytime you can get a quarter of the House to join you on a bill, you have an issue that has wide and broad support. That’s nothing to be dismissive about.
The effort to curb noisy TV commercials now turns to the Senate, where Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.) has introduced the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, S. 3156.
The momentum of this issue coupled with the demise of BusRadio, the compulsory commercial radio company that exploited children on school buses, shows that awareness of captive-audience media is increasing. As media companies continue to try to force-feed people their content, that awareness will only grow.
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 and involuntary attention: cynical manipulation
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on January 5th, 2010
Why do the police trigger their sirens and flashing lights when they’re trying to cut through traffic? The answer is something we never had to learn about in school: the noise and the light command our attention.
Researchers have been looking into what’s known as “involuntary attention” for years and what they’re finding has much to say about what our future will look like in a world where TV and other audio-video media is everywhere. When you go to pump your gas? There’s a TV on the pump. Checking into a hotel? There’s a TV in the lobby. Relaxing at the bar? TVs are ubiquitous. Riding the subway? TVs are in your future.
Why this explosion of TV everywhere, especially when more people than ever are electing to lead TV-free or TV-reduced lifestyles?
The answer lies in what researchers are learning about involuntary attention. Why do we find nature walks relaxing? Because the brain enjoys taking a vacation from concentration and likes to be told what to attend to: what to look at and what to listen to. It likes to eschew responsibility and have decisions made for it. Nature walks help facilitate this by forcing us to attend to sudden changes in our environment such as that red bird that flits ahead in the trees or that squirrel that dashes up the tree trunk. We like it when we can let down our guard and let sudden movement and noise direct our attention to all the things going on around us. No doubt that’s why people like wandering around a shopping mall or sipping coffee at an outdoor cafe and people-watching.
It’s safe to say that researchers pretty much know why we like TV so much. The formal aspects of TV—the edits, the scene changes, the background music—are like an “involuntary attention” symphony. Our brain never has to take charge; it just has to sit back and, like on a nature walk, let the formal aspects of TV command our attention.
Of course, our brain isn’t a total slacker. As John Medina makes clear in his book Brain Rules
But here we are in 2010 and the predators in the natural world are subdued for all intents and purposes. Involuntary attention helps us cross the street safely and avoid getting elbowed on a crowded train, but it also has a lot of downtime. And one thing we know about our senses, they like to be used. As Marshall McLuhan said, if we can entertain our ears, our ears like to be entertained; and if we can entertain our eyes, our eyes like to be entertained.
Enter digital out-of-home (DOOH) media such as place-based TV networks and other captive-audience audio-video platforms. Like the siren and flashing lights on a police cruiser, the formal aspects of these media—the flashing light, the unremitting audio—exploit and manipulate our involuntary attention.
The content of this media doesn’t really matter, because it’s the formal aspects that force us to watch. Our brain involuntarily sends our eyes and our ears to the screen and to the audio. If we want to concentrate on something else, it’s up to us to try to tune it out: the burden is placed on us, the captives, to say no, while the perpetrator doesn’t have to do anything—except maybe not offend; if the media content offends us, then we might raise objection. That’s no doubt why so much out-of-home content is always the same inanity centered around sports and celebrity gossip.
As we face a future of TV everywhere—on street corners, in elevators and hotel lobbies, on trains and buses, and so on—the question for us is, who has the right to command our attention? We allow the siren and lights of a police cruiser to command our attention because we have a compact with the police, who are public servants.
But what compact do we have with captive-audience media companies? We have none. They’re simply and cynically manipulating our involuntary attention for their own ends.
The blog tvSmarter is doing some great work in the area of involuntary attention and I highly recommend it for its thoughtful, important work.
Brain Rules and TV: One Dimensional Lifestyle
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, Media noise on January 3rd, 2010
I’m reading a great book on the brain called Brain Rules
For those of you tuning into this blog for the first time, captive-audience media is audio and video media located in places where we can’t ignore it. Think of TV in the backseat of cabs, on elevators, and in buses, trains, and subways as a few examples.
Brain Rules author John Medina, a molecular biologist, talks about how the brain learns. As we take in and use new information, little pathways and connections in different parts of our brain multiply. That’s something you’ve no doubt heard before.
The good news is that we continue to grow these pathways throughout our life, so we remain capable of adapting to new environments.
The bad news is that the portion of our brain devoted to visual perception, already the biggest of all our senses, keeps getting bigger. That growth comes at the expense of other senses. In other words, the battle for growth in our brain is a zero-sum game: as the pathways and connections related to visual perception grow, space for pathways and connections related to our other senses shrink. It’s probably safe to say that our sensitivity to smell was at one time much stronger than it is today, but our visual dominance crowded that out.
This is important because as our common areas get increasingly turned over to audio-video media—when was the last time you went to an airport restaurant that didn’t have a bank of TVs blaring at you?—the pathways and connections in our brain related to processing this type of content will grow.
Of course, the strengthening of our visual processing capabilities relates to your ability to read this blog, too. But there are more battles going on in our brains than just our visual sense competing against our other senses; there are battles going on within the visual processing areas.
Medina says different parts of the brain specialize in different parts of visual processing. Thus, the more you’re exposed to a certain type of visual stimuli, the more we grow the pathways and connections that specialize in that type of stimuli.
In a nutshell, then, the growth of audio-video media is quickly creating its own demand: the more we’re exposed to banks of TVs in restaurants and all the other places we gather outside the home, the more our brain reorganizes itself to accommodate that type of input—and the less our brain is able to organize itself for other types of information. The one crowds out the others.
If you think about the difficuty young people today have at reading and writing, it stands to reason that reading and writing won’t come naturally to them. How could they? They’ve grown up watching TV, playing video games, and surfing the Internet in their bedrooms.
If it’s true their brains are being wired mainly for audio-video consumption, so be it. You can’t stand in the way of change. But this push into captive-audience media by companies whose only motivation is to make money sounds a lot like the tobacco industry a century ago, when the rush was on to get consumers hooked on smoking.
Well, we’ve finally learned something about smoking, but now we have cynical companies flooding the places we gather outside the home with TVs, artificially limiting our media choices and making it increasingly difficut to read or even just sit and think.
Medina himself thinks using audio-video media to learn is a fine idea, but what his discussion of the brain makes clear is that our difficulty in reading in the face of banks of TVs isn’t a mystery: it’s the inevitable result of our brain pushing out other types of processing centers so it can make room for more processing of today’s increasingly ubiquitous audio-video content.
It’s a zero-sum game, and captive-adience media is stacking the deck in its favor.
