Captive audience? What captive audience? There’s no such thing…..

Is there such a thing as captive audience? That still remains a subject of much needed debate but in my humble opinion, there’s no such thing. It is a well known fact that media representatives will say anything to advance their chances of selling their media type, I don’t blame them though – we all want the dead presidents, don’t we? In an industry where certain mediums sell themselves and others have to graft hard to get a piece of the pie, the situation has degraded to the lowest point where the hard grafting media representatives will come up with all sorts of feeble mechanisms to convince advertisers to spend money on their medium.

For the fringe media types that don’t have AMPS backing their medium, they find themselves in a position where they have to use gut feel and personal opinion to advance their own interests. However, gut feel and opinion don’t count much in this industry, media practitioners are still chaperoned by the inaccurate statistics spewed by Telmar. I’m of the opinion that if gut feel and opinion are used correctly, they can sell any medium better than AMPS data. The short-fall is that most media representatives haven’t mastered the art of using gut feel and personal opinion to sell their medium’s interest. The art of using gut feel and personal opinion to sell media type can only be mastered if the individual selling a specific medium knows and understands the psychographic behaviour of the audience in question. But again expecting someone who resides in Sandhurst and has never been to a taxi rank to sell a medium that operates in the taxi rank environment is more like expecting Obama to be a key note speaker at the next KKK AGM – it’s not going to work out right.

So for all you people selling Rank TV, Star Radio, Taxi TV, rural Cinema advertising etc, there’s no such thing as a captive audience. Let’s take Star Radio for, example, if you know Bree taxi rank, you’ll understand and acknowledge that Radio in that environment is like a fart in a desert storm, completely ineffectual. There are 101 taxis coming in and out of the rank, hooting and noise loitering all over the rank, so why tell me that the masses that uses the taxi rank on a daily basis are a captive audience? Captive to the depressing environment, perhaps yes but captive to the medium on offer, a definite no no.

If I was a client and someone was trying to sell me a particular medium and their argument was that they offer a captive audience, I’ll tell them THANK YOU VERY MUCH BUT NO THANKS I’LL PASS. I’d rather buy into a self captivated audience instead; henceforth I think digital is the future. People spend endless hours captivated on YouTube and it’s because they want to not because it’s forced down their throat, pity we can’t say the same thing about Star Radio, Rank TV etc.