From the Mass Market to the Supermarket

By Gigi Marino

Fifty years after Ginsberg’s paean to poetry and peaches, Arts and Sciences alumnus Joseph Turow, C’72, ASC’73, Gr’76, the Robert Lewis Shayon Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication, tells his students that if they want to understand culture, they have to go to the supermarket. “Look at the mats on the floor, the signs on the shelves, the labels on the products.”

Marketers not only appeal to the customer, he says, they have invented who they think the customer is, based on warehouses of data collected on all of us. It may not be poetry, but there is a lot of “shopping for images” going on in the consumer profiles that marketers are putting together. And, Turow says, “the supermarket is going to be the next battleground for new information technology in the marketing sense.” Computer-aided shopping, he thinks, will yield the newest weapon that marketers can use in the war to separate customers from their cash.

Turow has been teaching Mass Media and Society for 30 years – at Penn since 1986, after a decade at Purdue – but he says there’s a school of thought that claims “mass media” and “mass communication” are anachronistic terms. “Over the last 100 years, scholars have taken ‘mass communication’ to mean the sending of messages to large numbers of people – dispersed, diverse and anonymous audiences. … With cable and the Internet, we have smaller audiences who are not anonymous to the senders of the messages. When you go to a Web site, people know who you are.”

That’s the subject of his 10th book, tentatively titled Favored Americans: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age. The customization of information and access has made convenience a commodity for anyone plugged in, but Turow argues that it’s a two-way street. Not only do “the media come into our homes, but they also take away information about us.” And, he adds, it’s information we willingly give away.

Say, for instance, your favorite credit card offers you a 20 percent discount when you log on to the company’s Web site before making a purchase. Cool, you think, I can save money buying the things I would normally buy. What many people don’t do, Turow says, is read the privacy agreement.

“I’ve read quite a few privacy policies, and they’re not designed to be readable,” he reports. “There are good reasons to read these policies. Not all sites are scrupulous. They may include things that you don’t want, like downloading spyware, which follows you everywhere on the Web.” Still, that discount is appealing, so you click the agree button. Now when you log on, every search and purchase is tracked. This kind of consumer behavior allows companies to collect information on the individual and on his or her buying patterns and socioeconomic status.

At 54, Turow is tall and lean with boyish brown hair and black academic spectacles. Talking with him is a mixed lesson in history, capitalism, culture and trivia. His office is decorated with movie posters of “Gone with the Wind” and “Naked Gun,” original Tom Swift books, a 1950s Olivetti typewriter (like the one he took to camp in the Catskills to write fiction for the weekly camp paper), and a 1920s vacuum-tube radio.

His father emigrated from Lithuania in 1947 and settled in Flatbush, N.Y. He won a TV set in 1950, the year of Turow’s birth. Turow grew up in the television age – mid-century in a post-war world set on defining the American dream. He is the perfect cultural critic for mass media, which he points out, has constructed the very idea of our world.

“I was supposed to be a lawyer,” he says, “but I wasn’t interested.” As an English major at Penn, he started reading the magazine “Advertising Age.” It was the Vietnam era, and a professor criticized his pro-establishment interests. An American civilization course he took drew connections for him between culture and media, and that started him questioning cultural values and the way the American media have interpreted – and invented – them. “The 20th century was built on marketing,” he says.

One of his first books was Entertainment, Education and the Hard Sell: Three Decades of Network Children’s Television. He’s become a de facto expert on the I’m-not-a-doctor-but-I-play-one-on-television phenomenon. His book Playing Doctor is about the relationship of the medical system and prime-time television, and he has written numerous articles on television’s presentation of health care. The multimedia CD he produced, called “Prime Time Doctors: Why Should You Care?” was distributed to 40,000 medical students by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Having ended up at Albertson’s, the online grocery store, after a stop at Sesame Street and the office of Marcus Welby M.D. may seem like a stretch, but not for a media hound like Turow. And it is the grocery store, be it an online or real-time one, where today’s media products converge as advertisers target shoppers with sales or coupons based on what they think the customer wants or might buy.

“Audiences don’t exist, they’re constructed,” Turow contends. “You have TV programs reaching 18-to-49-year-olds because that’s what advertisers are looking for.” To Turow, mass communication is important as an idea because it highlights the industrialized production and distribution of messages through technology. With computer-driven mass customization, these communi-cation industries can now influence small groups, even individuals, as efficiently as they have manipulated large populations. “Niche markets are simply a way to allow media to present what they think the public wants,” he says. “Today’s mass media offer interactivity in a way that was never before possible.”

Consider the Shopping Buddy, an IBM product that assists shoppers in grocery purchases. A cart-mounted computer into which shoppers scan their customer card, Shopping Buddy anticipates and accommodates individual needs, distributing coupons based on past purchases, remembering preferences and even recommending what to buy. This is the juncture of marketing, culture and media – all targeted at the individual consumer.

It is the information that Shopping Buddy “knows,” recorded into the store’s checkout database, that engages Turow’s interest. Shopping is at the heart of his current research as he develops a national survey that will investigate people’s understanding of how businesses use perks to collect information and then deploy it to further shape buyers’ behavior. He says, “the more marketers know about people, the more they can sell you. … The typical customer thinks, ‘It’s terrific,’ and ‘Why not?’”

Here’s why not. Turow’s main concern is that media outlets will use the data to customize not just purchases and perks but even the news, entertainment and advertisements you will see. “Most people have no idea about what the transfer from the home to the supermarket to media sources will be like,” Turow says. “We’ll see a huge growth of digital television, digital phones, digital shopping carts and even paper that can change electronically based on what media firms and advertisers want to send.”

Individuals will be surrounded by personalized messages drawn from what companies know about them. “On the one hand, that might be great because somebody else is offering us choices that we don’t have to think about,” he says. “On the other hand, somebody is thinking for us, and we’re not paying attention to what that means. Much of the world each of us will see will be increasingly guided by visions of us that companies wanting to sell things to us create.”

Those companies don’t tell us what they know or what their profiles of us are. “How can we be sure we like or agree with them? How will we know that the materials we get are worth more than the ones our neighbors – with different profiles – receive? Will they get better prices or discounts than us because companies think better of them?”

A recent “New York Times” story (“What They Know About You,” 11/14/04) reported that Wal-Mart maintains 460 terabytes of customer data in its computers, more than twice the digitized information on the Internet. “Marketers haven’t figured out what to do with all these data,” says Turow. “In 10 years, they will.”

He predicts that in the future when you turn on your TV, “the news you get will be different from the news your neighbor gets, based on your personal media consumption, including shopping habits. But it won’t be an invasion of privacy. Rather, people will try to prove to marketers that they are worthy of special treatment by giving up lots of personal informa-tion and allowing businesses to track their behaviors. This will mark a fundamental change in the relationship between consumers and marketers. It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s emerging.”

It’s not yet clear exactly what we’re giving away in exchange for perks. “I’m not saying it’s all dark and terrible,” Turow comments. “But the digital approach to favoritism and discrimination is changing 100 years of marketing and media. … What will its social implications be?”

Gigi Marino is the editor of “Bucknell World” and a freelance writer.