Coersion by Radio

The next time you're in a pharmacy or a big department store, stop for a second and listen to the radio beaming overhead. Especially if you're a 25-54 year old woman. What you'll hear is what you always hear in those places--lite, dreamy, muzak. But what you'll also hear is 30 ad spots hyper-targeting you in an attempt to ramp up point of purchase sales. In other words, the radio will be talking to you.

It's part of a deal struck between a marketing company called Point of Purchase (POP) Radio and Westwood One Radio, which is the largest radio network in the country and is partially owned by CBS (sister to Viacom). So far Rite Aid pharmacies and K-Mart stores are among the first big outfits to sign up. They like it because the messages can be changed quickly and because it costs them less than regular radio.

Oh, and because you can't turn it off. Here's what the Rite Aid CEO has to say for it: "The consumer can't hide or change the channel."

In a media landscape that is increasingly giving people the control over advertising content, allowing them to block it online through pop-up blockers or browser extensions and to block it on TV through the use of a DVR, marketers are digging in their heels in those places where you can't block or skip the ad. And they're not just announcing specials and sales to the whole store; they're hyper-targeting one demographic, based on a batallion of consumer research.

NPH is just saying, beware of the radio.

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Viacom Slaps YouTube

has ordered YouTube to take down tons of its material. Jeff Jarvis of Buzz Machine thinks it's a foolish move (most of his readers disagree). NPH tends to agree with Jarvis that, even though much of Viacom content (like "The Daily Show" with John Stewart) is available on Comedy Central's website for free, YouTube is the great communal gathering place for media content, so much so that free content probably works as promotion for paid content. In other words, find John Stewart on YouTube, then go watch more on Comedy Central's website, then watch it on TV.

The opposite view, obviously, is that it's theft.

The fundamental issue this all boils down to is advertising. It's what all television ultimately boils down to, because it's ultimately what television is for: to advertise. Viacom doesn't want people viewing its material in a way that gets them no ad revenue. Their content is free on their own websites, which are loaded with paid advertising content (NPH's experience with Comedy Central's website has always been slooooooow due to all the ad content). Yet young people particularly are gravitating to content that ostensibly doesn't bombard them with product promotions. But without that, networks have no revenue stream.

NPH has long made use of a tool called "Who Owns What" run by the Columbia Journalism Review. Here's the entry for Viacom, which includes all of their television networks and film studios. The summary of the company reads like this:

One of the largest global media empires, Viacom has a financial interest in broadcast and cable television, radio, Internet, book publishing, and film production and distribution. Some of this vertically integrated conglomerate's highly recognizable properties include the CBS network, MTV, Infinity broadcasting, Simon & Schuster, Blockbuster and Paramount Pictures. With such a diverse portfolio of properties, Viacom is one of the most profitable media giants as CBS is a top draw for older viewers while MTV remains the most popular teen orientated media outlet.

Its' content may be teen oriented, but its delivery method just took a step in the opposite direction.

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Cultish Crap

Jackie Huba at Church of The Consumer has a take on the Mini Cooper Talking Billboard Campaign. Huba is a Cooper owner herself, so when a friend asked her if she would recommend the car, she took note of the cutting edge marketing in light of her experience with the product. The billboards (which receive an electronic signal from your key and display a personalized message) are intended to intensify the "cultish loyalty" exhibited by Cooper owners already. But that cultish loyalty wasn't a result of talking billboards or secret decoder advertisements; it was the reaction of consumers who genuinely enjoyed a good product, regardless of the ads.

As for Huba, here's what she told her friend:

So I told her about the nagging problem with the hatch door that has a habit of not always latching. And the rattling noises that creep up at highway speed. And the heat that comes out of the vents unless you have the A/C turned on. And that all the dealers in Chicago are an hour away from downtown

It's a sad departure from the almost anti-marketing approach that marked the rise of the car.

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"I'm Not Your Priest"

Here's the link to the Guerilla Marketing piece on ABC's Nightline last night. NPH wasn't able to watch its' broadcast, because we live in a media market that prefers syndicated sitcoms from 10:30 to 11:30 rather than news.

The Nightline correspondent's interview with Rushkoff took a sort of confessional turn when he asked if the media was itself a part of the fallout from marketing ploys like the one in Boston, prompting Rushkoff to answer, "Well, you can't help it. The media loves to talk about itself." When the correspondent asked if he ought to feel guilty about that, Rushkoff looked at him with confusion for a couple of seconds before letting out a nervous and deflective, "I'm not your priest."

NPH enjoyed that.

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Rushkoff in Five Minutes

Until then there are these videos made by the Adult Swim vandals.

NPH is so done with this story after this.

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Exhibit A

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Rushkoff on Nightline

Douglas Rushkoff will be on ABC's Nightline tonight talking about the guerilla marketing debacle in Boston yesterday. The bomb-like ad was simply a cartoon character made out of led's, the little lights shown in the above video.
What NPH finds eery about this is not that citizens can so easily bring a major American city to its panicked knees, but that these kinds of pranks were the invention of graffiti artists and activists. That they're so easily taken over by a major media corporation like Turner Broadcasting (which also owns CNN, which has done some indignant reporting about the incident)for "covert" marketing creeps us out a bit. And is not all the reporting the best kind of PR Turner could ask for?

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