Treat your audience with respect
In this cross-posting from The Conversation, Sinclair Davidson argues that the TV networks are entitled to turn down GetUp’s anti-News Corp ad on the grounds of taste.
Media is a tough business. Everyday starts from scratch and, in the broadcast media every second of the day has to be filled with content. Consumers are fickle – if they don’t like what they hear or see they’ll flip channels and once gone, there is no guarantee they’ll come back.
That translates into a simple maxim: don’t abuse your customer. For mass media that means have somewhat bland offerings that will appeal to large audiences. To be sure, the broadcast media don’t always get it right – shows get cancelled, or moved around around all the time. The principle remains the same: the media don’t go out of their way to annoy or antagonise their audience.
That brings me to the Get Up advert that is causing so much fuss.
This is not a free speech issue at all – the government hasn’t prohibited the advert, it is freely available for viewing, it has been shown on the government’s wholly-owned media organisation, nobody will be arrested or fined for viewing it, or for being in possession of the advert. All that has happened is that private broadcasters don’t want to run the advert.
There is an academic analogy – if a particular journal refused to publish an article or a publisher refused to publish a book we wouldn’t claim censorship. So it is with the Get Up advert.
The commercial broadcast media don’t want to be associated with the advert.
I’m not surprised. The advert is very “clever” in an undergraduate sort of way. No doubt they had great fun in devising the idea – let’s have someone wrap dog poo in the newspaper and then tell the audience that Australians can vote for whomever they like. Let’s add in some anti-foreign bigotry while we’re at it. Yeah, that’ll be fun.
Get Up are to be commended that they’re spending their own money (actually their donors money) for that sort of thing – but I don’t believe that anyone else should be under some sort of duty to actually air the advert. The broadcast media don’t have to expose their audiences to advertising they think will annoy their target markets.
Sinclair davidson is professor of institutional economics at RMIT University. This article was originally published at The Conversation. Read the original article.
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You’ve hit the nail on the head Sinclair Davidson…the networks aren’t under any legal obligation to show any company’s advertisment, and can reject ads for whatever reason they like (bad taste, offending viewers/other clients, poorly made ad etc.)
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All valid points. However, we know none of these are reasons why the networks refused to run this particular spot. Infantile to suggest otherwise.
The networks are famed for their ethical objection to lots of ad content aren’t they? Hardly.
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“Don’t abuse your audience” is indeed a simple maxim to live by, and it’s one almost every media commentator/educator/anyone willing to speak publicly is eager to tell you they believe in. But the practical reality is that as far as I can see no-one actually practices this maxim. I know this a cynical thing to say, but it does at least have the virtue of being the truth. Don’t ask me how to fix it either, a pre-condition of fixing a problem is a will to do so, and Australian media outlets don’t respect their audience enough to bother.
Onto the ad while I agree with your broader point that any publisher doesn’t have to publish (pardon the pun) crap they don’t agree with I think you are being very charitable if you think broadcaster are doing this because they suddenly discovered the concept of tasteful advertising. Its far, far more likely that it may just have a tinsy bit to do with business relationships.
It stretches plausability to think broadcasters just happened to decide to start treating their audience with respect just now.
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Poorly thought through article.
Only one network said the reasons the rejected the ad was taste, 7.
The others said it wasn’t to do with the ad itself but the fact it was criticising another media agency: https://www.getup.org.au/campaigns/media/murdoch-ad-update/why-we-were-banned
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The networks don’t own the airwaves, the people do and grant them permission to use them.
If they don’t want to support free, fair and democratic speech because of their own cowardly corporate interest, then maybe they shouldn’t be entitled to continue earning the billions they’ve reaped over the last 50 years.
To deny them access to free political speech is to deny all citizens that right at the expense of an elite organisation manipulating the masses.
But hey its not long before an actual airwave will become mostly redundant.
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Last October Tim Burrowes was berated by commenters for categorising the boycotting of Alan Jones’ sponsors as “censorship”. “Censorship is government enforced,” cried the commenters, “our boycott is simply us exercising our commercial rights to withhold our custom”. “Besides,” they said, “Alan Jones can simply go on the internet to express his views if he is taken off the radio.”
I’d be interested to see if any of those commenters would be prepared to categorise this case as censorship now that the politics are a little different.
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lolol, respect their audience? Pray, tell me, oh great master, why “The Shire” or “Slide Show” were ever considered to be viable if networks “respected their audience”.
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So each network reached the same conclusion about the offensiveness of dog poo? Come on. And they all refused to run Greenpeace’s anti-coke ad because it featured dead seagulls.
Media organisations have a legal right to reject advertising for what ever reason they like. I just wish they had the guts to be honest and say “it was against our commercial interests”. SBS was one of the few who did with the Greenpeace ad.
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How funny, the TV networks turned down the ad, but the News Limited websites took it via their Google adsense ad tags. I have proof, but jump onto m.Heraldsun.com.au and check it out yourself! ! Cheers
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Sinclair, what a piece of absolute drivel. You talk about taste from a network that broadcasts a reality TV show called Big Brother; from another that broadcast a reality TV show called The Shire; and from yet another that broadcasts shows like Today Tonight. And then you come down off your high horse (which was on top of your pedestal) to suppose that it was clever in an ‘undergraduate’ sort of way. How generous of you. What you failed to mention at all was the critical issue that the ad was addressing – the extreme bias of certain media organisations who happen to be owned by a certain individual who would like to see a very specific individual in The Lodge. As for “Let’s add in some anti-foreign bigotry while we’re at it. Yeah, that’ll be fun.” – the certain individual who aspires to be in The Lodge is campaigning on the anti-refugee platform – across all their ads; ads that had a free run on all of the above mentioned networks. Shame on you, sir. If one of your students submitted such a ridiculously selective argument, you’d be obliged to fail them.
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“Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, politically incorrect or inconvenient as determined by a government, media outlet or other controlling body.”
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The point is; there exists a mechanism by which Networks can ‘regulate’ their ad content. It is FreeTV and their Commercial Acceptance Division (CAD).
The CAD website has very specific regulations, codes of practice and guidelines.
Apparently the GetUp ads passed these and were issued with CAD Approval Numbers.That should be the end of it. Good to go!
Sadly, free-to-air TV has given up. Squandering the Public Bandwidth with reruns of MASH and F-Troop on their digital channels. On the original 7, 9, 10, transmission overnight is almost completely Infomertials for saucepans and exercise equipment.
No wonder none of them want the NBN, it would hasten their demise and THEY want to do that themselves. Doing a pretty good job, too.
Rupert has got his PM, got his nobbled NBN, got no credible competition for Foxtel. All he has to do is figure out how to migrate Classifieds completely online and he’s won bigtime.
And we let him do it. We need GetUp more than ever!
Disclosure: I support GetUp and am an occasional volunteer for them.
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