How do you quantify the death of print media? One way is to use data just released from the Newspaper Association of America that newspapers lost more than $18 billion in the last three years.
The easy explanation for all this red ink is that newspapers got the Internet wrong. But there’s another way to look at it. Print media in general and newspapers in particular are looking like the last remnants of what we might call “pull” media. These are media that depend on their ability to pull in their audience with compelling content. If they can’t pull in audiences, advertisers go elsewhere, their bottom line goes south, and they go into a death spiral.
Captive-audience media companies, by contrast, are actually growing during these very difficult economic times. Indeed, companies operating in this media are experiencing the opposite of a death spiral; they’re in a virtuous cycle of revenue growth that leads to platform growth that leads to more revenue growth.
Why the difference in economic fortunes of these two types of media?
The easy answer is that captive-audience media is largely screen and audio media. In a world in which people are giving up the reading habit, screen and audio media is the preferred media choice because it places little demand on its audience.
But this explanation might be too simplistic. After all, network television, the grandfather of screen and audio media, is having its own troubles. Although it’s holding its own in the revenue wars, it’s no longer king of the mountain.
Rather, the explanation might lay in the fact that captive-audience media is “push” media, the very opposite of the “pull” quality of newspapers and other types of traditional print media.
“Push” media doesn’t need to pull in its audience with compelling content. By its very nature it pushes its content out to an audience whether that audience wants it or not. Its advertisers are thus assured of reaching a certain number of eyeballs.
This is a great situation for the media companies and for the advertisers. But what about the audience?
To be sure, captive-audience companies release poll after poll showing how much people like to be entertained while they’re out and about: filling their tank with gas, waiting to buy groceries, riding in a train, waiting at a bus stop, riding in an elevator. Thus, TVs in these settings are a net plus.
In a sense, captive-audience companies must have something that looks like authoritative research to support what they’re doing because if most people took offense at being force fed media, than advertisers would pull out because what advertiser wants to risk its brand equity by intruding on people?
That’s what happened to Channel One, the commercial in-school compulsory TV network. The company is still around and is even gearing up for a big push on a Web TV series it’s developing, but a few years ago the company was struggling and had to find a new owner because parents and organizations such as Commercial Alert succeeded in shaming advertisers into pulling their support for the company on the grounds that it’s wrong to force children, in a legally mandated public school setting, to watch commercial TV.
But an argument can be made that captive-audience companies are using their polls as a Trojan horse and that the entertainment element to their content serves much the same purpose as mosquito “anesthetic.”
The way a mosquito operates is by injecting its hosts with an anesthetic-like compound just before it sucks blood. It’s because of the anesthetic-like effect of the compound that in so many cases we don’t know we were bit until after the mosquito has already had its meal.
Captive-audience media works in the same way. As an uninvited guest, it needs to preempt any offense we might take by numbing us with entertainment. With the host sufficiently softened up, the path is paved for the advertiser.
In a world in which captive-audience media is rare, it’s hardly worth taking offense at this. Both the entertainment and the advertising are inoffensive. The intrusion is minimal.
That’s why the U.S. Supreme Court in 1952 decided a captive-audience case in favor of the captors rather than the captives. The case involved piped-in commercial radio on a commuter train. The court ruled that most people didn’t mind and that by voluntarily riding the bus people gave their tacit consent.
The case wasn’t without controversy and two justices took grave issue with the decision.
But it’s worth asking whether people would be so quick to give a thumb’s up to being made captive to unwanted media if the question wasn’t whether they liked the TVs on the gas pumps or in the grocery store, but whether they wanted to live in a world in which much of the places they conduct the business of their lives is characterized by captive-audience media.
Asking a pedestrian whether one person’s second-hand smoke is bothering her is different than asking her if she’d like to live in a world in which much of the environment in which she spends her time is characterized by second-hand smoke.
The possibility of open-ended captive-audience media was clearly on the minds of the Supreme Court a few years before the commuter-train case when it voted against the captors and in favor of the captives in a case involving an audio truck. The court looked at whether a town was within its rights to prohibit a man from blasting a message from a loudspeaker on his truck while he drove around.
Here the court made clear that allowing such a practice could lead to intolerable living conditions for people, because the door would be open for anyone to drive around and impose one’s content on people without their permission.
“Unrestrained use throughout a municipality of all sound amplifying devices would be intolerable,” the court said. “The unwilling listener is not like the passer-by who may be offered a pamphlet in the street but cannot be made to take it. In his home or on the street, he is practically helpless to escape this interference with his privacy by loudspeakers.”
Clearly, private businesses are free to hold their customers captive to unasked-for media if they want.
But with captive-audience media on the front end of a growth cycle and traditional “pull” media in the opening throes of a death spiral, it’s clear we’re staring into a future in which more of our places will be characterized by captive-audience media. “Pull” media cannot compete with that, so we can expect traditional media providers, as a survival tactic, to take on more of the characteristics of their “push” media competitors.
At some point, no amount of numbing by entertainment will be able to disguise the fact that the horse is within the gate, its door open, and our firewall breached.
