Posts Tagged Out-of-home media
12,105 acts of protest against captive-audience media
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on April 5th, 2010
12 months, 12,000 views
We at Media by Choice have been unable to post in a while but we wanted to take a minute to recognize a milestone for our effort to raise awareness of what’s wrong with captive-audience media (TV and other audio and video media in places where we can’t escape it).
We launched the Media by Choice blog almost a year ago (April 19, 2009) and today, 88 posts later, we’ve attracted 12,105 views, or about 1,000 views a month, or 136 views per post on average.
We like to think of each view as an act of protest against captive-audience media. Of course, we know it’s not really like that. But one thing is clear: word is getting out. We now have other blogs linking to ours and, what’s more, people are finding the site through their searches. That tells us we’re attracting the readers we set out to attract.
And our book, Noise Wars: Compulsory Media and Our Loss of Autonomy
Our posts on boom car noise continue to be the most heavily viewed. The most popular post of all time, with 2,665 views, is On noise, a judge who gets it, about a judge who threw the book at some men who retaliated against their neighbor for complaining about pumping their bass-heavy stereo all night. That post even generated back-and-forth commentary on Reddit, which we take as validation that the post struck a nerve.
Of more recent posts, a short piece we did on a Virginia Tech researcher who back-tracked and admitted that “TV on a stick” (billboards with TV) needs to be regulated before it becomes ubiquitous, attracted a lot of viewers. And it’s a personal favorite, too, because it captures the essence of how captive-audience media interests operate. First, they say we love their force-fed content and then they roll out research to support that. As we’ve said from the very beginning, getting surveys to support your point of view isn’t rocket science. Anyone can construct a survey instrument and set parameters on your universe of respondents to achieve the outcome you want.
In the Virginia Tech case, the researcher all but admitted that this is what happened. First, she was paid to develop research showing TV billboards are no more distracting than any other type of roadside media. She did that, but her research was rejected by the Transportation Research Board, a congressionally chartered research agency. Then she told the New York Times that she personally believes that TV billboards do cause more distraction and pose a safety hazard than conventional billboards. To us, this simply shows what we’ve contended all along, that when it comes to the research the captive-audience media touts, the emperor has no clothes. Put another way, digital out-of-home (DOOH) media are forcing highly distracting content down our throats, exploiting our involuntary attention, and holding up research they they design and commission to give them a fig leaf of validity to hide behind. Speaking for ourselves, we don’t buy it.
There’s simply no place for captive-audience media in our world. We live in a noisy, busy place and we need to be able to pick and choose when to consume audio-video media. It’s too distracting to have it forced on us. Although many people think this is a non-issue and that we ought to devote our time to ending hunger around the world, the fact is, as audio-video media continue to fill our public spaces, more people won’t find this a non-issue any longer; they will see it for what it is, the vehicle for a few people to commandeer our eyes and ears for their purposes, taking advantage of us when we can’t escape it.
DOOH Researcher: Digital Billboards Need Regulation
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity on March 3rd, 2010
The captive-audience media industry in 2007 paid researchers at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute to look at digital billboards—what some people call television on a stick—and found, unsurprisingly, that the billboards don’t pose a distracted-driver problem beyond that of any other type of billboard.
Critics of the billboards say the research was flawed and point to its rejection for publication by the Transportation Research Board, the congressionally chartered agency.
While the debate over the quality of the research will surely go on, what’s clear is that even the lead researcher on the project says regulation is needed for billboards that use flashing lights and quick movement to attract people’s attention.
“If we don’t . . . get on top of this right now while the capabilities are expanding, every roadway will be filled with flashing lights and video,” says the researcher, Suzanne Lee.
Lee is quoted in the March 3 New York Times in a major feature on the controversy over digital billboards, what we on this blog call captive-audience media.
We at Media by Choice have to pause and savor the irony: the Digital out-of-home (DOOH) media industry paid Lee to conduct her research and she did what she was paid to do: find that digital billboards are no more distracting than regular billboards. But now the researcher is telling journalists that, despite what her industry-paid research says, she believes the billboards do in fact up the distraction level.
From our point of view, there’s no mystery to this. Digital billboards exploit what scientists call our involuntary attention. Like TVs in places where we have no choice but to watch them—like in elevators or on buses—digital billboards use our involuntary attention not to protect us against big cats slinking through tall grass on the Serengeti but to hit us with audio-video content that no one has asked for yet isn’t allowed to escape.
Given the massive investment in money and other resources by media and other companies into captive-audience media, the growth of high-distraction platforms like digital billboards is like a big ship that simply can’t turn back. But as the researcher Suzanne Lee says, the time to look at and understand the impact this media has on us is now—while we’re still on the front end of this growth curb. What we mustn’t do is wait until so many tens of billions of dollars have been invested that no one is willing to say that this juggernaut of inescapable media has no clothes.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Victory for media choice: BusRadio closing down
Posted by R. Freedman in Audience captivity, TV Turnoff on October 3rd, 2009
In a body blow to captive-audience media and a victory for those who oppose having out-of-home digital media content forced on them, BusRadio has pulled the plug on its compulsory commercial radio programming on school buses and is expected to make an official announcement next week.
BusRadio makes its money by providing targeted advertising to a captive audience of children on public school buses and has been the subject of intense push-back from parents and others who’ve taken their concern to Congress, the FCC, and to state and local governments.
“BusRadio severely underestimated parents’ determination to keep advertisers off of school buses,” the Center for Commercial-Free Childhood says in a statement. “And now, thanks to all of our efforts, parents no longer have to worry about their children being bombarded by student-targeted advertising on school buses.”
Commercial Alert has also been involved in efforts against the company.
Still on parents’ radar screen is Channel One, which provides free audio-video equipment to cash-strapped schools in return for providing 12 minutes of daily in-classroom TV programming. The programming includes two minutes of targeted advertising.
Parents have long charged Channel One with exploiting mandatory school attendance laws for commercial gain. The company almost went under a few years ago after critics launched a campaign asking companies not to advertise on its programs, but it survived and today has a new owner.
The BusRadio victory shows that the steady drive by out-of-home media companies to fill our common areas with intrusive audio-video content that we haven’t asked for isn’t proceeding without constraint. BusRadio and Channel One are clearly the most egregious and indefensible examples of captive-audence excess, because they involve our chidren. But as captive-audience media expands throughout our common areas and eat away at our ability to lead lives without having unsought content always in front of us, media companies can expect more push-back.
Not everybody wants the distraction of audio and video in front of them wherever they go; having TV screens on elevators and on gas pumps and in restrooms and on buses, trains, and subways, in taxis, and in office and hotel lobbies, and in medical offices, among other places, is creating its own antithesis. As it should. No one owns our viewscapes and soundscapes. No one should be forced to to consume distracting and invasive audio-video content they haven’t asked for.
—Robert Freedman, author, Noise Wars: Compulsory Media and Our Loss of Autonomy
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.
