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tailoring the capacity to aim media content and ads at particular individuals
selectability the ability to reach an individual with entertainment, news, information, and advertising based on knowledge of the individual’s background, interests, and habits
accountability to advertisers the ability to trace an individual’s response to a particular ad
interactivity the ability to cultivate a rapport with, and the loyalty of, individual consumers
The past two decades have seen tremendous growth in the ways advertisers and public relations practitioners create, combine, and use lists to reach target audiences. Americans have told pollsters in growing numbers that they worry that too much information about their lives and personal preferences is being exchanged without their knowledge. It also seems clear to direct marketers that people believe that they are receiving too much junk mail and too many telemarketing calls. Moreover, both pollsters and academics predict that the growth of online services will increase worries about privacy as more ways of collecting personal information (such as cookies) are created. (See Chapter 15 for a discussion of privacy.)
Another possible consequence of targeting that deserves mention involves marketing and media firms surrounding people with content that speaks so much to their own particular interests that those people learn little, and care little, about parts of society that do not relate directly to those interests.
Critics such as Joseph Turow (yes, this book’s author) point out that the ultimate aim of twenty-first century marketing is to reach consumers with specific messages about how products and services tie in to their personal lifestyles. Target-minded media help advertisers and public relations practitioners do this by building what we might call “primary media communities.” These are not real-life communities where people live. Rather, they are ideas of connection with certain types of people that are formed when viewers or readers feel that a magazine, radio station, or other medium harmonizes with their personal beliefs and helps them to understand their position in the larger world.
Some media are going a step beyond trying to attract certain types of people. They make an active effort to exclude people who do not fit the desired profile. This makes the community more “pure” and thereby more efficient for advertisers. Media executives accomplish this objective simply by purposefully placing material in their medium that they know will turn off certain types of people while not turning off others (and maybe even attracting them). The message of target radio stations, cable networks, and magazines is often that “this is not for everyone.”
Jackass, a coarsely funny reality program, filled this role for MTV during the early 2000s when the network was working to position itself as a young adult-oriented channel. Operand Nurse Jackie, Showtime series about, respectively, a likeable serial murderer and drug-addicted, adulterous, yet likeable nurse did the same for that network in 2009. These programs had so much “attitude" that they sparked controversy among people who were clearly far removed from their “in” crowds Executives involved with scheduling the shows hoped that the controversies surrounding them would crystallize the channels’ images and guarantee that the channels would be sampled by the people they wanted to attract. The executives acknowledged that they also expected these “signature shows” to turn off viewers whom they didn’t want in their audience.
An even more effective form of targeting goes beyond chasing undesirables away. It simply excludes them in the first place. Tailoring is the capacity to aim media content and ads at particular individuals. Mass customization, clickstreams, Web cookies, and interactive TV navigators are terms we have learned that reflect an awareness that the long-term trajectory of media and marketing is toward customizing the delivery of content as much as possible. With just a little effort (habit, actually), people can listen to radio stations, read magazines, watch cable programs, surf the Web, and participate in loyalty programs that parade their self-images and clusters of concerns. With seemingly no effort at all, they receive offers from marketers that complement their lifestyles. And with just a bit of cash, they can pay for technologies that can further tailor information to their interests—through highly personalized news delivery, for example.
Customized media are still pretty expensive, so PR and advertising practitioners mostly reserve them for upscale audiences. The high cost of introducing interactive television that can customize programming for large populations has caused the process to take longer than some media firms would like. But the competition to develop interactive technologies has not faded. The momentum toward creating targeted spaces for increasingly narrow niches of consumers is both national and global.
All signs point to a twenty-first century in which media firms can efficiently attract all sorts of marketers by offering three things. One is selectability—the ability to reach an individual with entertainment, news, information, and advertising based on knowledge of the individual's background, interests, and habits. The second is accountability to advertisers—the ability to trace an individual's response to a particular ad. The third is interactivity—the ability to cultivate a rapport with, and the loyalty of, individual consumers.
Some companies, to be sure, will want to get their brands out to the broad population as quickly as possible and will find mass market media useful. They will support the presence of billboards, supermarket signs, and the few TV shows that still draw mass audiences, such as the Super Bowl, the World Series, and the Miss America Pageant. This kind of programming helps create immediate national awareness for a new car model, athletic shoe, or computer.
But even this material will be targeted in the future. For example, Warner Brothers Television might try to reach as many people as possible to offset the high production costs of a TV movie about a nuclear disaster. Yet it might achieve this by public relations activities aimed at targeting people's personal TV navigators with tailored plot synopses—one for people who are interested in science, and a different one for people who like the lead actor. At present, it is cheaper to customize news and information programs than to customize top-of-the-line entertainment. For instance, NBC might tailor its election coverage to viewers with different interests. Consumers who care about foreign affairs, agricultural topics, or environmental issues might be able to choose the network feed that features detailed coverage of election results in their special-interest area.
Over and over, some media critics predict, different versions of news will present different social distinctions to different people. And even when the content is the same (as in the nuclear disaster movie), producers will aim different PR and ad campaigns to different types of people or different media communities, thus encouraging the perception that the viewing experience in America is an enormously splintered one. The net result will be to push separation over collectivity.
These critics argue that it will take time, possibly decades, for the full effects of the emerging media world to take shape. Even when the new media environment does crystallize, consumers will still seek media that are not specifically aimed at them. Increasingly, though, the easiest path will be to go with the customized flow of media and marketing paraphernalia. For you and me—individual readers and viewers—this segmentation and targeting portends terrific things. If we can at or p we’re important to PR or advertising sponsors who will pick up the able to receive all the news, information, and entertainment we like. Who would not welcome media and sponsors that offer to surround us with exactly what we want when we want it?
A critical view of the situation would argue that, although this may benefit us as individuals, it could potentially have a harmful effect on society. Customized m driven by target-oriented advertising and PR allow, even encourage, individuals to live in their own personally constructed worlds, separate from people and issues that they don’t care about and don’t want to be bothered with. This kind of segmentation of the population diminishes the chance that individuals who identify with certain groups will even have an opportunity to learn about others. In a society in which immigration is increasing ethnic variation and tensions, the goal should not be to use the media to connect people. Rather, the media should encourage people to do the hard work necessary to become aware of other cultures’ interests, to enjoy various backgrounds collectively, and to seek out media interactions to celebrate, argue, and learn with a wide spectrum of groups in the society.
The problem, say media critics, is that the advertising and public relations industries are working with media firms to go in the opposite direction. Their goal is to ease people into media environments that comfortably mirror their own interests so that they can be persuaded more easily. Media practitioners see nothing wrong with this approach. Media analyst Sut Jhally is among those who disagree. He argues that the tendency of the persuasion industries to play to people’s self-interests rather than the larger society’s interests is quite predictable. “The market,” he says, “appeals to the worst in us... and discourages what is best in us.”
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