As the screens face off, the computer appears to be holding all the aces, as the poor old television stares into a busted hand. Computers are smart. They can track user input and decipher a consumer’s interests and tastes. TV is a voice crying alone in the wilderness, broadcasting the same message indiscriminately to all.But wait: at the very least a television could monitor what shows someone watches. Then, that record of viewing patterns could be fed into a computer, and voila, TV grows a brain. The Wall Street Journal reports:Data-gathering firms and technology companies are aggressively matching people’s TV-viewing behavior with other personal data.This raw data provides fodder for analysis, as extrapolations from viewing patterns could lead to conclusions about the viewer’s tendencies and wants. TV could be another tentacle of the monster of consumer predictability, as marketers try to to catch the wave of treating people like automata with wallets.
The question then becomes: why would advertisers pay for a shotgun blast on television when they could buy a sniper’s bullet on the internet? More from the Journal on traditional TV advertising:That’s now too blunt an instrument for some advertisers, whose expectations have been raised by the Internet.The reason for seeking upgrades to the old TV advertising model is that television remains at the epicenter of traditional means of content delivery, bringing viewers the shows that define modern entertainment. As one commentator, quoted in the Wall Street Journal puts it:“Most of the work that has been in online advertising over the past 20 years has really been preparation for the big screen. That’s where the money is.”The internet has yet to prove itself as a medium for the kind of content that TV offers, and the big game hunters of the marketing world want TV’s established presence as a content trough.More pointedly, there is the question of what new genres could emerge to facilitate the trend towards targeted marketing. Conceivably, content producers could create entertainments with the specific purpose of eliciting viewer self-identification. A half-hour food show is great, but it doesn’t do all that much on its own to read the audience.On the other hand, a ten minute show devoted to New York pizza goes a long way in bringing about the self-identification of audience members as consumers with at least a passing interest in New York pizza. New advertising models could lead to new genres of entertainment, whose specific function would be to serve as mirrors of – and drivers of – consumer taste.The circle jerk of content and marketing continues apace. Will it offer us more useful programming or simply more junk food?
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