Most irritating things in media. No. 3 in an occasional series: 'Passive'

In media, we like to create either/ors. Different media are generally pushed (or pulled of course) into various binary oppositions. As well as push/pull, we have lean forward/ back; interruption/engagement; new/old; and, today’s niggle, passive/active.

Unless you are reading this from a print-out (which is either very dedicated or rather weird), you are probably leaning forward, switched on, plugged in and active. Either way, you should be explicitly conscious of my every word landing neatly in your pre-frontal cortex.

But tonight at home – so conventional media wisdom goes – most of you will have swapped your office swivel chair and mouse for a sofa and remote control to watch some telly. You will have moved away from active and towards passive.

TV is generally deemed a passive pursuit.  It is indisputably a relaxed and enjoyable one - and especially on Monday evenings for me at the moment. I am overwhelmed with TV goodies: Murderland, Flash Forward, In Treatment, 30 Rock, Life.  So, as I sit there gripped by Robbie Coltrane’s story, or struggling to piece together the clues dropped around Joseph Fiennes or consumed by lust for Alec Baldwin can I really be described as passive?  I’m certainly not moving much, but it’s like Piccadilly Circus in my head. I shudder to think what my brain activity levels are when I watch Countdown.

As Robert Senior so elegantly put it, we’ve all got a PhD in film grammar these days, so adept are we at interpreting complex narratives from condensed audio-visual stimuli.  Is ‘passive’ the right word to use when we’re guessing who did what, working out what will happen next or solving a conundrum?  I prefer ‘receptive’.

Even if you think passive is the appropriate term, you should re-evaluate whether that’s good or bad.  The state of mind we are in when we watch TV has a big impact on the influence and effectiveness of TV advertising.

In his book 'The Hidden Power of Advertising' (a must-read for all) Dr Robert Heath developed his theory of ‘low involvement processing’. He suggested that the way we absorb brand messages can be either 'high' or 'low' involvement.

In a nutshell, ‘high involvement processing' is conscious, active, explicit learning. You should be high-involvement processing now, reading this. High involvement messaging is normally rational, logical or time-sensitive information. Typically, print and online text are good at this.

TV can do this type of messaging too but is also processed at a low involvement level; a cocktail of conscious and semi-conscious activity. Much of it involves 'implicit' learning that takes place without you knowing that you are learning. You are currently low involvement processing what is going on around you – your colleague whistling that irritating tune again, the empty coffee cup on your desk, the smell of your colleague’s lunch - or even the smell of your colleague.

Information we receive via low involvement processing is squirreled away by our minds to our long-term memory without any conscious filtering which is when the risk of rejection is high. As such, it is an incredibly effective way of increasing a set of associations around a brand and is well suited to thematic or brand messages that need to be remembered for the long-term.

This more passive processing works best for brands where the purchase decision requires low involvement (little risk, little product differentiation; low cost; frequent purchase). But it can also be the best way to get a brand on the list for consideration for higher involvement purchases (like buying a car or choosing a holiday destination). We just don’t know it is doing that.

If you want to see this principle in action, just watch Derren Brown influence people’s behaviours without any active input from them.  Watch him from your sofa, where your body will be passive, but your mind certainly won’t be.

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Rio Ferdinand, media futurologist

In a surreal moment, the respected media analyst and futurologist Rio Ferdinand has linked the fact that the England-Ukraine match is going to be online pay-per-view to the recent claim that internet advertising has ‘overtaken’ TV advertising:

"I read that online advertising has taken over from TV”, he apparently said, “so that tells you something about where it's going in terms of the digital world…So I’m sure it'll be the way forward and in the future it'll probably be the reality. I think it's a good way to gauge how many people are interested."

If ever the IAB’s claims needed a dose of credibility, surely this is it.

But Rio is not alone, unlike how he sometimes finds himself in the box. Among others, Marketing took a deep breath and declared ‘England game heralds future of sport on web’.

On the flipside is this from Janine Gibson, Guardian.co.uk editor, who disagrees it is a prophetic moment and explained why The Guardian declined the offer to screen the match:

“You had to sign up to an enormous amount of editorial endorsement and promotion for something that we weren’t convinced was of particular value to our users and would feel like a fake endorsement of a one-off match. This isn’t heralding the beginning of a new dawn; it’ll never happen again and it feels slightly opportunistic.”

She obviously needs to have a chat with Rio.

But over and above all this is the fact that the match being delivered by the internet might be interesting and contentious now, but once TV sets are fully broadband enabled it won’t really matter. Viewers won’t care how it is getting to their screens. It is all TV and they will hopefully have the experience they want.

It is unsurprising that England football fans are in uproar over the fact that the match is being screened via an online TV service and not on broadcast TV. They can still see it if they want to, but not the way they’d like to.

Amid all the fuss, we should remember that the game was originally contracted to appear on broadcast TV (with Setanta) and, if it had been an important game with something at stake, it probably still would be. I can’t see a match England actually need to win or a World Cup Final going online only pay-per-view – although maybe a new series of Rio’s World Cup Wind-Ups would be ok. It is a fairly unique set of circumstances that have lead us here.

The fan forums I’ve looked at are less concerned with the idea of paying to watch it, though, than they are with a delivery system that means they can’t watch it in the pub or on the big screen in the living room and have to crowd round their laptops or watch it individually instead.

They demand the shared experience that only TV can give them. But having failed to agree rights with a broadcast TV company, it is understandable (or maybe greedy) that the agency responsible for this match – Kentaro – looked for an alternative buyer. The end result might not be as good as broadcast TV but it is better than nothing. Still, that is scant consolation for fans.

The fact that newspapers are so keen to become broadcasters – with the Times and Sun being among those who will show the match – is really interesting but not new. They already have various bits of video content on their websites, but this football match is one of the few pieces of roughly ‘must-have’ TV content they can get access to. TV broadcasters show appointment to view programming all day every day and newspapers clearly would like a piece of the action.

I suppose the main concern for fans that do choose to pay to watch the match is how well the UK’s internet pipes will handle demand. The fact that the number of viewers has been capped at one million worryingly shows how unprepared the UK broadband infrastructure is for major transmission of big events. It needs upgrading, as Digital Britain pointed out, and TV companies are as anxious as anybody to get an additional digital network to digital broadcasting. How is it going to cope when the majority of people are watching TV in HD, or with the other resource-hungry innovations like 3D coming along?