TeleVISIONS (Autumn 1976)

= 8 HISTORY Blue Sky Blues: Monopolies, Sponsorship and New Technologies An interview with Erik Barnouw By GAYLE GIBBONS and LARRY KIRKMAN We talked with TV historian Erik Barnouw at his Washington office in the Smithsonian Institution’s castle where he is working as a Woodrow Wilson Fellow on a book about broadcast sponsorship. In July '76 Smithsonian Magazine and later Cable Lines ran his article surveying new communications technologies. We were anxious to follow up some of the tentative and somewhat ironic speculations advanced in that article. His words follow. When each of the new communication technologies came along there were visions of it doing something spectacular for enlightenment/democratization. You find these astonishing predictions. For example, when the phonograph record appeared in 1878, Edison said it will be a tremendous thing for education. Well, pretty soon it wasn’t as much for education as for other things. Then, when motion pictures came along, it's fascinating to read magazine articles from 1905, ’06, ’07. They foresaw it solving all the problems of education/democratization and citizenship. When radio came along in the 1920's, _the articles that were appearing in 1921, ‘22, ’23 said the same thing. When FM came along there was a book called Radio’s Second Chance. FM was going to be different, and for a while it did seem to be different. But as its audience expanded it became very much the same. So when cable comes along, and you hear the same blue sky predictions, you feel a little cautious about it. Recently, | read a story about CB. FCC members were in favor of expanded channel ruling. They thought it was an access medium. |’m a little skeptical about it. The FCC-created cable access channel has not amounted to much. To talk about CB in terms of access means even less. Mostly one-to-one conversation over a very small area. CB. was used to organize the independent trucker strike and also for prostitution. Butto what extent is this an answer to the kind of power exercised by commercial TV over millions of homes simultaneously? The video medium suggests the possibility it will become almost as cheap to do something on tape as to use a pencil. Then you've got a medium that is accessible to everyone. You'll still have a distribution problem, though. The multiplicity of channels made possible by fibre optics will also provide a distribution channel. But even with more channels—FM acquired extra channels—all seem to be doing more or less the same thing. So where are we? Take alternative FM. The question is if it can get beyond being a Hyde Park corner or a 14thSt. soap. box and take off to become a.medium. that has an impact on ideas. There is an illusion of wide participation by people in TV but it is easily controlled: you just throw away what you don’t want, keep what you want. All the little speeches about how marvelously the soap washed the thing. All those things precipitated in the same sort of way Jean Rouch got peo ple to talk on the street. ApparéAtlyzyou* + can get people to talk about soap. The best actors have learned to talk like real people. Acting is completely different. You look at acting of 15 years ago, and it is a completely different style. We learn from tape how people talk. | remember that audio tape had an enormous impact after the War. When the first recorders came out, it was very exciting to record somebody and then listen to them. Just extraordinary. It was a revelation, because voices coming from recording machines had never sounded like that. There is much more improvization in all feature films than there used to be and in commercials too. So many commercials are very cinema verite-type commercials nowadays. Both political commercials and many other commercials as well. Most of them are not the direct cinema that Leacock and others did: waiting for something to happen. They’re more on the order of the kind of thing Rouch was doing: of getting something to happen and filming it as it happens. I’d say it has had an enor ~ mous effect on production methods in general & it sort of diffuses out into the industry. But as ABC became more successful they dropped those documentary film“makers. | think that they were not. ‘getting the ratings that ABC had hoped they would get. Sponsors were not especially enthusiastic about commissioning any projects of that sort, because they could never know what would come out of it. They created a certain amount of nervousness and didn’t build up a large enough audience. There is an enormous issue in the fact the more we get into cable, the more we create new control points, new gatekeepers. That’s why in the Smithsonian magazine article | went into the whole history of communication by wire and the various times when there was a very strong monopoly of communication exercised by Western: Union. It was actually: much stronger than was suggested in the article because there really wasn’t room for going into it. That was.a period when newspapers relied completely on Western Union for news from other places. This monopoly was controlled by Jay Gould, who also controlled railroads. It was so powerful that, annually, for 15 years bills were introduced in Congress to create an alternative system linking the nation’s post offices with telegraph wires. The bills were defeated year after year, but any newspaper who editorialized in favor of it or had anything kind to say about it was assumed to be in danger of having its news cut off by Western Union. That was one of these sacred subjects that you avoided. It became a kind of crusade. When the Western Union monopoly finally was broken by the telephone ... then a new telegraph company came up calling itself Postal Telegraph. It had nothing to do with the postal system. By that time, however, the term postal had become a kind of rallying cry, so they adopted that term. Ironically enough that is what became part of ITT. we have this Ore fibre _thing, and eer everything to be done through a mere strand of wire. It creates a possibly dangerous situation. If the same wired system can carry cable TV, telephone calls, and handle all the computer networks, etc., then you have the very good possibility of the whole system becoming one system. When such things are technically possible they tend to happen. The issue of control is tremendous and very difficult to come to grips with. | remember when radio came along. Anyone who thought the phonorecord would survive was considered crazy. It practically died out in the early 1930’s, and actually began dying even earlier than that. But there are all kinds of ironies. Phonograph records were saved by “race” records in the early 1920’s. Blacks who really were under-represented on radio began to be excited about records. They stood in line to buy Bessie Smith records. This pulled Columbia records through what looked like disaster. Early in the 1930’s new companies sprang up, and the phonograph record became powerful. Decca began in 1934. No one would have thought it would become Erik Barnouw author of Tube of Bianity'l in his Smi uw offi Qe. ... ete eae spe Seale i Sitachaep baay Shinde se J. breakdown. More and more the sponsor is in a position where he doesn’t need to watch programs. He just gets from Nielsen the demographic breakdown of programs: what sex, age, etc., or economic status is the audience of this or this program. He can then match those to the same demographic breakdown of the people who buy his product. Then he can say to the producer: | don’t want to pay for men and children. | am just interested in women between the ages of 18-24, and that’s all I'm going to pay for. What assurance can you give me? Actually, the larger advertisers are getting an assurance that they will not have paid more than so much per 1000 women in the category they’re interested in. If, after the period of 3 months according to the Nielsen statistics, they have paid more than that they get some bonus spots to make up the difference. That means the sponsor is constantly turning thumbs down on some programs, and up on others. You find some programs with pretty good ratings going down the drain because they’re not reaching the right audience. That happened with Gunsmoke. It was so powerful that it would buy Universal Pictures. Then both were bought by MCA. These ups and downs are quite fantastic. | find it very hard to speculate about it. ! can’t talk about my book too much. It’s in first draft. In general, there are three parts. The first is the role of the sponsor in the broadcasting field historically, beginning with the invention of the idea by ATT in 1922 to the present. That goes through quite a few changes, first in radio, then in TV. So I'll trace that difference historically, then go into the different kinds of programming and the relation of the sponsor/underwriter to it. In the 3rd section of the book I’llassess the meaning to society. Not quite sure yet what I'll say. Historically the sponsor and the advertising agency own the programs. They produce/conceive, very often for a specific merchandising purpose. Now, however, the relation of the sponsor to the program is much more indirect. He’s buying just minutes and the network execs say he has no influence whatsoever over programming. That | doubt because he isn’t buying minutes the way he buys them in England or Italy. He’s always buying a specific minute in a program. The value of the minute or half minute he buys is subject to continuous negotiation so that there is a constant auction going on. It is more or less like the stock market. The value of a spot on a certain program goes up or down from week to week. If the series is a success, the price immediately goes up. If it is slipping, the price goes down. So on any one program—let’s say there are 5 spots on a program—they may all have been bought at different prices. More and more Nielsen has reported not only households listening to a program, ‘but has given the sponsor a demographic found that the audience that had listened to it for years and years was getting older and older. It wasn’t reaching young audience, it wasn’t reaching many women, and it was just reaching an old audience which was good for laxatives or some tonics. But they could be reached by news programs which Stations felt they had to carry. There are lots of laxatives on news programs. The networks actually provide the agencies with the demographic statistics on who buys what product in exactly the same categories as Nielsen breaks down the program audiences. They suggest to the sponsors to match this up with the Nielsen demographics. Then they can say: We have just the programs to serve your needs. Well, when it becomes as scientific as that, a sponsor no longer dares to go by hunch. He no longer dares to say “That’s a great program we. watched last night, let’s get behind that.” Why would anyone stick his neck out that way? Instead he looks at Nielsen reports/demographics. He looks at a retail marketing index. and demographic statistics on who buys what product. They match these up, and as long as you’re going on this scientific basis no one can blame you if something goes wrong. You have ample scientific reasons for doing what you're doing. This becomes a kind of expertise which no longer has to do with whether you like a program. You get into a situation where sponsor decisions do make programs rise in value to the network or make them less valuable to the network. That’s where the sponsor can’t but help having a hand in the programming decisions: to what extent is a program going to serve the needs of the sponsors? That is quite different from the situation ““you have in television systems in other — BT) o< m 1 i9) 25 =O mm z= <= mreevers Petes rae