news & trends
As if George Bush doesn't have enough to worry about. Candidates
for the Presidential election may find themselves increasingly running up
against an electronic wall. Using remote controls to "channel graze,"
Americans are zapping out costly campaign messages.
Avoiding politicians and political ads is one of the main reasons
channel grazers love to flick. While campaign man" agers and advertising
executives squirm in their Barcaloungers, zapping has its positive power
K transforms TV viewers, making them active participants in a
traditionally passive pursuit.
"It's exciting because you are able to effectively create your own
viewing environment," insists Robert W. Bellamy, Ph.D., professor of
communications at Duquesne University. There's nothing remote about that
kind of control in the nation's 70 million zapper households.
The ability to compose personalized television menus with the tweak
of a thumb gives viewers another kind of power "It confirms their world
view and supports their ideas about how things are," says James R.
Walker, Ph.D., of Memphis State University, who, with Bellamy, studied
the viewing habits of 455 college students.
The danger is, today's flickers may be tomorrow's political
illiterate. Grazing, "disinterested, undecided voters" could be putting
themselves out of reach.
Why do flickers flick at all? Two of the top reasons are obvious,
the researchers report in Journalism Quarter, (Vol. 68, No. 3). Viewers
want to find out what's on TV, and they want to avoid commercials.
What came as a surprise was the large number who said they hit the
remote control to avoid watching specific individual or certain parts of
a program. "A lot of people like watching the news, for example, but will
flip the channel when Dan Rather comes on," Bellamy explains. Others
flick through the channels to get more out of watching TV, to access
different types of programs, from MTV to CNN. "When the war broke out in
the Persian Gulf, you could sample a large variety of news shows and
gather a large amount of information," notes Walker.
But, for a few, the world view is strictly confined from the
start--they zap simply to annoy other viewers.
People of all ages like to flick. Still, Walker sees flicking as
"the viewing style of the new generation of viewers who were raised on
cable with the remote control in hand."
And they give people like Peter Kim a severe headache. As an
executive vice president at giant J. Walter Thompson advertising agency
in New York, Kim fights the flickers with "roadblock ads"--identical
commercial appearing simultaneously on all channels.
But Kim, whose agency represents such brands as Nuprin, Kodak, and
Lubriderm, may have trouble convincing viewers to "Nupe it" in the
future. Says Bellamy: "We're moving to models of television viewing where
people will have massive film libraries available through a combination
of cable and fiber optics."
ILLUSTRATION
Tags:
channel surfing,
commercial,
flick,
flickers,
george bush,
political ads,
politics,
remote control,
remote controls,
television,
tv viewers,
undecided voters,
watching the news,
watching tv
