[corp-focus] Louisville Refuses To Turn On The BusRadio

[robert weissman]

LOUISVILLE REFUSES TO TURN ON THE BUSRADIO
Robert Weissman
May 24, 2007

Marketers can't seem to stop thinking about the spectacular marketing 
opportunity afforded by schools.

It's easy to imagine the conversation in the business meeting room: Kids 
are bored in school -- we can grab their attention with ads! Compulsory 
schooling creates a captive audience for us -- if we can just get in the 
door! Schools are perfectly age-segmented -- just what we need!

That's the kind of thinking that led to the creation of Channel One, 
which wraps 10 minutes of pap news and entertainment around two minutes 
of ads broadcast into classrooms. It is the mindset behind billboards at 
school athletic fields. It explains student book covers that sport 
corporate ads.

And it is the thinking behind the hideous new enterprise known as BusRadio.

This is the Needham, Massachusetts-based BusRadio's offer: The company 
will provide school districts with custom-designed and installed 
equipment at no charge. BusRadio will pipe in its own network (the 
company has separate programming for elementary students and for middle 
school and high school kids), playing pop music, public service 
advertisements and "age-appropriate" commercials. Not only that, but the 
company will share some of its ad revenues with the school district.

All the school district has to do is offer up its kids as a captive 
listening audience.

BusRadio is off to a slow start. It lurched into operation at the 
beginning of the 2006-2007 school year, and claims to have managed to 
lure schools with just 100,000 students into accepting its deal.

Its stated target is 1 million kids for the coming school year.

Earlier this week, it hoped to increase its captive audience base by 
more than half by tricking the Jefferson County, Kentucky school board 
to sign on the dotted line. Louisville is in Jefferson County. The 
school district has 60,000 bused students.

Happily, parents -- who know all too well how their kids are saturated 
with commercial messages -- are getting wise to the marketers' efforts 
to invade schools.

As soon as they learned of the BusRadio proposal, parents and activists 
scrambled to mobilize opposition. Parents and advocacy groups wrote to 
the school board. The PTA lodged objections. And parents went to the 
school board meeting prepared to protest.

There was no need. Their message had already been delivered.

The Jefferson County school board rejected the proposal without even 
taking a vote.

“The board received a lot of input from the community, and based on what 
we heard, we decided this was not a contract we wanted to consider," 
board chair Joe Hardesty announced at the start of the school board 
meeting, according to a report in the Louisville Courier-Journal.

In a follow-up note to parents and others expressing concern about the 
BusRadio proposal, school board member Debbie Wesslund wrote, "I 
certainly share your views about allowing commercial advertising on 
buses. As most of you said, we spend plenty of time already trying to 
limit our children's exposure to advertising, inappropriate music and 
pop culture in general."

Advertising in schools and school property like buses is such a bad idea 
that even a majority of marketing professionals believe it is wrong. A 
2004 Harris poll of youth advertising and marketing professionals found 
that only 45 percent “feel that today’s young people can handle 
advertising in schools.” Forty-seven percent believe that “schools 
should be a protected area” and that “there should not be advertising to 
students on school grounds.”

Schools should be a place for education -- to gain knowledge, to acquire 
a love of learning, to develop and discover one’s own unique 
personality, to learn how to build friendships and solve conflicts, to 
internalize community and civic values. Commercial intrusions -- already 
all too present in kids’ lives -- undermine virtually every aspect of 
the educational enterprise.

There is a growing revolt underway against commercialization of the 
classroom. Channel One was just about driven out of business, before 
recently being acquired by a new company that will likely keep it going 
for a short while before throwing in the towel. There is a groundswell 
to kick soda and junk food companies out of schools. And ridiculous 
ventures like BusRadio are now finding it is harder to trick parents and 
schools than they might have expected, or than they might have found 
five or 10 years ago.

Protecting children from the commercial onslaught is a worthy and 
vitally important objective in its own right. But it is also is an 
opportunity to begin, ever so slowly, to address a broader ill.

Marketing madness has overrun our society. It imposes on our time, 
debases our culture, poisons community ties and even relations among 
friends (who may duped into becoming company representatives through 
"buzz marketing" arrangements) and threatens our planet with its 
hyper-consumerist message.

Jefferson County and many other places are taking the first strides to 
recovery from this lunacy, by asserting the importance of non-commercial 
spaces and times, and of protecting children from the corporate predators.


Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational 
Monitor, <http://www.multinationalmonitor.org> and managing director of 
Commercial Alert <http://www.commercialalert.org>, which joined the 
protest against BusRadio.

(c) Robert Weissman

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