Page 54 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

3
New technologies, audience measurement and
the tactics of television consumption

THE PROBLEM OF THE AUDIENCE

In February 1990, Walt Disney Studios decided to prohibit cinema theatres in the United
States from airing commercials before screening Disney-produced movies. The decision
was made because the company had received a great number of complaints from
spectators who did not want to be bothered by advertising after having paid $7.50 for
seeing a film, leading the company to conclude that commercials ‘are an unwelcome
intrusion’ into the filmgoing experience (Hammer 1990:38). Of course, Disney’s decision
was informed by economic motives: it feared that commercials before films would have a
negative effect on the number of people willing to go to the movies, and thus on its box-
office revenues. As a result, the issue of in-theatre advertising is now a controversial one
in Hollywood.
This case clarifies a major contradiction in the institutional arrangement of the cultural
industries. More precisely, the conflicting corporate interests represented by two types of
consumption are at stake here: a conflict between media consumption, on the one hand,
which is the profit base for media companies such as Disney, and the consumption of
material goods, on the other, presumably to be enhanced by the showing of commercials.
In this case, the conflict inheres in the very logic of cinema spectatorship as a consumer
activity, both economic and cultural. Films are discrete media products, to be watched
one at a time by consumers who pay a fixed entrance fee in advance in order to be able to
see the film of their choice. In this exchange, commercials are not included in the
bargain. On the contrary, it is suggestive of the controversial social meaning of
advertising that commercials are seen to hurt rather than enrich the value of cinemagoing.
In the cinema, the consumption of the film is to be clearly marked off from the selling of
goods and services through advertising, both in the experience of the film consumer and
in the economic logic of the industry.
The situation is altogether different with television. The very corporate foundation of
commercial television rests on the idea of ‘delivering audiences to advertisers’; that is,
economically speaking, television programming is first and foremost a vehicle to attract
audiences for the ‘real’ messages transmitted by television: the advertising spots inserted
within and between the programmes (e.g. Smythe 1981). The television business, in other
words, is basically a ‘consumer delivery enterprise’ for advertisers. So, in the context of
this structural interdependence of television broadcasters and advertisers, television
consumption takes on a double meaning: it is consumption both of programmes and of
commercials; the two presuppose one another—at least, from the industry’s point of
view. Once a consumer has bought a TV set, s/he has bought access to all broadcast
television output, and in exchange for this wholesale bargain s/he is expected to expose