Some points about captive-audience media you might not be aware of
1. Both President Obama and President Bush have advised against too much television, yet the goal of captive-audience media is to take decision-making about TV consumption out of our hands.
2. Even if you choose to stop or limit your TV time, you still must watch TV in a captive-audience setting, because the TVs are located in places such as elevators, trains, buses, taxis, doctors’ offices, public restrooms, and so on, where they can only be avoided at a high opportunity cost.
3. Some marketers tout the goal of making TV ubiquitous in the places where we do much of our business as a way to reinforce advertisers’ messages while people are out and about rather than when they’re sitting at home watching TV.
4. Captive-audience media has even come to our public schools, with Channel One TV and BusRadio, despite intense criticism of both business models by dozens of religious, civic, educational, and other nonprofit groups.
5. Two school children were even expelled from school for refusing to watch Channel One programming in class.
6. An article on BusRadio in the Washington Post generated almost 300 comments against the idea of holding children captive to intrusive commercial media while on their way to school.
7. Captive-audience TV is flooding retail settings, with some analysts saying almost a dozen specialty retail networks are launched each month.
8. Supporters of captive-audience TV in retail settings say the networks give marketers a chance to provide engaging, relevant content to consumers at a time when they’re making purchasing decisions.
9. Yet when the Washington Post ran a piece on grocery-store TV, dozens of comments were submitted blasting the TVs as intrusive and annoying.
10. The growth of captive-audience TV is expected to be huge in the coming years, in part because network TV is having trouble aggregating large audiences the way they once were. Thus, audience captivity is shaping up to be the future of TV.
