• by October 3, 2005

MEDIUM ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER -- Anyone else out there ever feel like they're stuck in some kind of time warp with the past and present continuously converging on themselves like a bad Harlan Ellison story? Well, sometimes that's just the way we feel covering the media business. Well, sometimes that's just the way we feel covering the media business. Oops! There it goes again. So quickly, before the vortex loops us back to the beginning and we start all over again, let us progress to the point of today's column. Which is, of course, that we keep looping back to the beginning all over again. Take today's "news." And we've intentionally put quotation marks around the word news so that you'd understand we are simply being sarcastic in this instance, and that it isn't really news at all, but something old that's news again. Something bouncing around since the mid-1990s and finally reverberating off the tinny back wall of this cheesy sci-fi time warp and spinning back out again in the form of, yeah you guessed it, a press release. Believe us, we tried pressing release, but the thing just kept whirling back at us. And here's what it said:

"Checkout TV will entertain and inform shoppers by airing engaging content on flat screen monitors strategically located in checkout lanes."

Huh? "Checkout TV?" Don't they mean "Checkout Channel?" And isn't this really 1993 when the channel mongers at Turner Broadcasting System asked us all to check out their promising new place-based network, which would "entertain and inform shoppers by airing engaging content on flat screen monitors strategically located in checkout lanes." It's 2005, you say, and Turner checked out of the checkout media business long ago? So who's this new upstart hoping once again to make cash registers ring? And why are they suffering from a severe case of industrial memory disorder? Actually, it may be more like a case of mass industrial memory disorder. Suddenly, place-based media is all abuzz again. They don't always call it place-based media, of course. Sometimes it's "shopper media," or "retail media," or even checkout media, but its places have suddenly become some of the hottest media spaces. A whole new, seemingly unnamable category of media is emerging in its path: "Other Media." Or as former Madison Avenue honcho Marty Puris coined his company: Not Traditional Media.

The nomenclature is important, because the place-based crowd is trying to come up with a new way of describing something old in a new way without confusing it with something new. New media, that is. Which some people think of as digital media. Which some people think of as online. The truth is that some of these other media are digital, and some of them even have online connections. But they don't seem to want to be connected with them. Nor do they want to be connected to their Other Media roots: place-based, which seems to connote point-of-purchase. And POP isn't nearly as lofty as concept - new as high as CPM - as Other Media might be. So let's create a new category of media that's based on elements of old media, infuse it with the gadgetry of new media, but position itself as something entirely different. Something other.

That's just what Premiere Retail Networks has managed to do, capitalizing on some important trends that are pushing agencies and marketers alike to think of place-based media in a new light. You've got to give PRN credit. Launched in 1992, they survived the original place-based bust, the rise of the Internet, and the dot-com bust, and the resurgence of online media, and appear to have landed in a good place. Let's call it higher ground. But is the place-based media of today any different from that of yesteryear? Sure it's ubiquitous. You can find it in elevators, in front of men's room urinals, at airports, at Wal-Mart stores, and yes, in the checkout lanes. But what's different about it this time than the last, when Turner's team found cashiers unplugging its Checkout Channel?

According to PRN, the difference is the programming, which it claims "is designed to entertain shoppers as well as inform them about new products and products that are available near the checkout stand. A ticker will provide news and weather updates." Now we know what the PR stands for in PRN. Meanwhile, we have a news update for the Checkout TV team: People don't want to watch TV while they're checking out of a store. They simply want to checkout.

Don't get us wrong. We appreciate the effort. If nothing else, it gives us something to write about, even if we've written about it before. We just don't think that much has changed in the past decade that will make people more prone to engage media while they're in checkout mode. Otherwise, they'd be calling them check-it-outs.

And it's not just our opinion. Many have gone before us. Turner obviously, but also NBC, and that was back in the days when it meant something to be "NBC." Remember NBC On-Site? Nah, we didn't think so. But some General Electric shareholders wish they could forget it. After spending millions in an attempt to develop its version of a place-based media network, NBC pulled the plug on the ill-fated venture. But before it did, we remember meeting with NBC On-Site chief Nancy Shalek, and rather smart Los Angeles agency founder who decided to leave Madison Avenue West to develop the world's next big TV network: One that would be distributed in mass retailers, supermarkets, convenience and drug chains nationwide.

Like PRN today, Shalek said the secret back then was "programming." And what exactly what the killer programming app that NBC On-Site had to stop retail shoppers in their tracks? Well our favorite was the little video vignettes of a groundhog raising itself out of a hole, standing up, and plopping over onto its back. We're serious. NBC On-Site was not.

Maybe we're wrong. Maybe times have changed. Maybe people have changed. Maybe they'll stand line lemmings in a checkout line paying rapt attention to programming and commercials asking them to buy more - just in case. Maybe this isn't a bad Harlan Ellison story after all. Maybe it's really a bad Philip K. Dick story. But we still feel like we've been here before. But we still feel like we've been here before..