MediaShift

You never know where a rant might lead you. Last Monday, I was ranting and raving about the annoying CNN Airport Network as well as other "place-based media" -- TVs that you can't avoid in elevators or checkout lines or airplane gates.

I was happy to see that many of you agreed with me, and found the idea of public TVs to be a turn-off, especially in this new age of personalized and portable media. But then I heard from William Jeakle, who happened to work at CNN in the '80s and helped develop the Airport Network, those ubiquitous TV monitors now available in 42 airports.

Jeakle left CNN in 1990, before the full launch of the Airport Network, and now helps run an independent film production company in Seattle called Filmateria, and blogs at The 4th Wave on new media issues.

Jeakle gave me some insight into how the CNN Airport Network came about, how cheap it is to produce, and just how much advertisers love it. And worst of all, he told me that it will take a lot more than a few complainers to get CNN to take down those monitors. The advertisers who are bankrolling the network would have to understand just how widespread dissent is before anything could happen.

Here is an edited version of our recent phone conversation.

Q: Tell me about your role at CNN, and how the CNN Airport Network came about?

Jeakle: I started there in '84 and was there until '90, and then in '87 when we were established on all the cable systems, [Ted] Turner decided he wanted to see CNN in non-traditional markets. We created a group called CNN Special Markets. Turner heard about Whittle's Channel One program [which runs in schools], and one of my jobs was to negotiate with Whittle because he wanted CNN's news and we were going to co-brand our news with them. But Turner thought we would anger the cable operators who had started to invest in CNN. We actually created an alternative to it called CNN Newsroom and that became the CNN Airport Network.

It was to create a free alternative to Channel One in schools, and that cable operators could give monitors away. But it didn't work because the cable operators said, "Why would we do that?" The division morphed into Turner Private Networks. Turner liked the idea of segmenting a market, but thought schools weren't the way to go from a PR standpoint. But going after businesspeople made a lot of sense, so we started the work for CNN Airport Network.

The group that I started became the group that rolled those out. My group was in charge of doing all the market research and putting together presentations for advertisers that would justify these markets.

Q: How did the Airport Network do?

Jeakle: CNN Airport Network was very successful. There was not much of a downside, because you could have a network just by having a different camera point within CNN Headline News. Whittle pioneered the idea of no waste in advertising. The idea is that if you're selling Snickers, and you want to sell to teenagers, why would you have to sell to moms and dads?

But after reading what you wrote [on MediaShift], I don't think the need for this type of advertising is going away. In some ways, it almost makes it more of a reason to keep the channel going.

At what point are you just annoying the audience? I don't have the answer to that, but I wanted to explain that even if people complain about it, that wouldn't be enough to shut it down. Because it meets your advertisers' target audience, and it's difficult to find what would replace that. When Whittle was selling Channel One, he told advertisers his goal was to reach one-third of teens every day...That was his big selling point.

The irony is that the place-based media space is booming. Because there are so many choices, the idea that you can finally get someone when they don't have a TiVo, you know that you're getting them, it looks good to advertisers. How the message will get back to advertisers that people aren't really watching, and that they're annoyed, I don't know. What kind of killer app would take its place, I don't know.

Q: Is there a way to make a TV service in a public space personalized if everyone's watching it?

Jeakle: Technically you could do a deal with whoever has the broadband service in the airport so people could accept the feed from CNN or not. Even that gives more choice than the current generation of advertisers wants to provide. But that's not good marketing.

I know when [the Airport Network] first came out it was astonishing in terms of the money it made. You're repackaging work you've already done, so from a production standpoint it has a lot of advantages. You're reaching a high-income demographic that doesn't usually watch a lot of television. But if those people are putting on headphones and listening to their iPods and reading the Wall Street Journal, if there's a way to quantify that, it will have an effect. But Nielsen rarely leads the way in this...If Nielsen can verify that the number of the demographic is in the room, then that's good enough [for advertisers].

Q: Tell me about your 4th Wave blog. What is the 4th Wave?

Jeakle: The first wave was television. The second wave was cable, allowing choice. The third wave being time-shifting, like TiVo, having what you want when you want it. The fourth wave is having the programming completely unfettered, having it when you want it and where you want it. And once you take the elephant off the chain, it takes a while for the elephant to realize he's not on a chain.

We've had a challenging time trying to get our clients to understand what a revolution it is when you talk about high-quality programming that can be watched anywhere, or downloaded to a video iPod that can be plugged into a screen anywhere.

CNN Airport Network is a second wave technology in a fourth wave environment. But the problem is that advertisers are stuck in the second wave. They haven't even figured out what to do about TiVo, so for them, the Airport Network is a beautiful thing, because no one ever got fired for reaching the demographics his clients were trying to reach.