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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