If you have traipsed through a hotel lobby lately; tramped on a health-club treadmill; guzzled a beer at a bar; or nervously anticipated your turn in the dentist’s chair, you likely found your eyes wandering to a video screen. The business of “captive TV,” as it is called, is booming. According to Nielsen, the television audience-measurement people, we collectively viewed a quarter-billion video advertisements in the last four months of 2009. Whatever the exact number, we don’t need Nielsen to tell us that it is getting harder and harder to find a public space free from the tireless and tiresome electronic beckonings of “location-based video.”
The business has grown by boasting several advantages for advertisers. A crowd of people with nowhere to go and nothing to do will look at the screens””plus the ads””grateful for anything to “help pass the time,” as one of the services says in its promotional material. Doctors’ offices, airports and the DMV get to turn the inconvenience of their clients into a revenue stream. The place-based systems also promise to deliver narrowly defined audiences that can be given tailored pitches. How better to market to drinkers than with ads in bars? Then there are the screens in bathrooms, which provide ads that one media company crows are, “perfectly gender segmented.” Perhaps most attractive to marketers in the age of digital video recorders: The passive public viewers don’t have access to a remote control. There’s no fast-forwarding through the advertisements.
Unless you have tremendous discipline and willpower, there’s no ignoring them either….
the free market at work
That the ubiquitous Headline News has become the present HLN must something about the market for Captive TV. That market perhaps says something about us.
Yes, it’s just terrible. If only the likes of Gawain the Episcopal Priest were in charge of us, we could all have inflicted upon us [i]his[/i] notions of tasteful commerce, in keeping with his own highly estimable values, and we would all be blessed and not subjected to such crass free-market values that surely cannot rise to the level of Gawain’s.
#3 Touchy, aren’t we?
The fellow who is complaining about the free market is Eric. I go to those bars. I ignore the ads.
Those who prefer peace and quiet, or have the same “estimable values” that I have can go someplace else. And we do. From what I understand, that’s a part of the free market.
🙂
But you know what I also can’t stand? Noise ordinances and zoning laws. Definitely anti-market.