8 CAPTIVE MARKETING

BOX 4.8 CAPTIVE MARKETING

The advertising industry is forever finding new places to hawk its wares. Some of the newest agencies, with names like Flush Media, Cunning Stunts, and Captivate Network, take advantage of places where people find themselves necessarily looking at a flat surface for entirely unrelated reasons. One of the most potentially profitable of these new “captive marketing” sites are public restrooms. Print ads or even video screens are appearing above sinks, urinals, and inside toilet stall doors in restrooms. The user is captive for a minute or so, a building owner can make some profit off the otherwise no-income-producing restroom, and very precise gender-targeted marketing can occur. Another popular new advertising site is the elevator, another non-revenue-producing space where both the advertiser and building owner can now make a profit. Increasingly, we are also seeing video ads in theaters, airplanes, buses, taxis, and even golf carts (Orecklin, 2003).

Sometimes we meet marketing where we least expect it. Big Fat Promotions of New York has hired people to pose as bar customers and talk up certain drinks to the clientele, mothers to talk up a laundry detergent at their children’s ball games, and commuters to play with a certain PDA on the train home from work (Eisenberg, 2002). A British agency even rents college students’ foreheads to display corporate logos of semipermeable color transfers made from vegetable dye. These last about a week, and students receive $6.80 an hour for the 3–4 hours a day they are visible to other students. Cunning Stunts spokesperson Nikki Horton reports reaction from financially struggling students has been “overwhelming” (Payne, 2003).

125 A Cognitive Psychology of Mass Communication

How effective are Internet ads and how do people respond to them? Social psychologist Brad Sagarin and his colleagues have conducted some research to begin to answer that question (Sagarin, Britt, Heider, Wood & Lynch, 2004). First of all, they found an extreme version of the third person effect (Perloff, 2002); almost everyone thought that they themselves paid no attention and were not affected at all by Internet ads. In fact, although they found the ads annoying, most people seemed willing to go along with the “exchange” of putting up with the ads in exchange for free Internet use. However, Sagarin et al. found some subtle ways that people were affected by Internet ads in ways unbeknownst to them. For example, the ads did sometimes distract users doing a problem-solving task, even though they did not remember paying attention to them.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of computer-mediated advertising is the advertising of pornographic materials and solicitations through web site advertising and through e-mail. Offers to sell products to augment penis or breast size, improve sexual potency, view sexually explicit photos, and, most disturbingly, meet sexual partners, come frequently and routinely by mass mailing to e-mail accounts, Many children have such accounts, especially through free providers like Hotmail, Yahoo, or Juno, and regularly receive such e-mails. Spam filters help some but do not screen out everything. Although the threat of porn on the Internet is often magnified to an irrational frenzy, the threat is real, and the legal system and social norms have not caught up with technology in figuring out how to deal with it. Child pornography in particular has become much easier to circulate via the Internet and e-mail, in spite of being illegal almost everywhere.

Prescription Drug Advertising

Although not a new place for advertising, one of the fastest growing areas of advertising, in terms of type of product, is the pharmaceutical industry. Emerging from being almost nonexistent at the start of the 1990s to an estimated $1.7 billion spent on TV advertising alone in 2000, the hawking of prescription drugs is a major growth industry (Belkin, 2001). Fourteen percent of prime time shows in the U.S. advertise prescription drugs, while half of adult prime-time programming and 43% of popular teen shows have ads for over-the-counter drugs (Christenson, Henriksen, & Roberts, 2000). A 1997 loosening of requirements which formerly had required including all consumer warnings in every ad, greatly facilitated this trend. One positive effect of this change is some increased empowering of the public to learn about these drugs and request them from their physicians. While this probably has brought needed treatment to some who would otherwise remain undiagnosed, it also has quite likely brought unneeded treatment to some looking for a quick fix to all of life’s problems. Although a physician’s

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prescription is usually still necessary, this is sometimes obtained without a consultation, particularly with drugs purchased over the Internet.