The Dangers of Niche Marketing   

Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World
By Joseph Turow
University of Chicago Press

Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World
By Joseph Turow
University of Chicago Press
242 pages; $22.50

Take a look at your media world and how personalized it has become lately. Your newspaper zones sections for your neighborhood; magazines work your name into editorial copy; cable news channels focus on your locality; and your online activities are tracked so marketers and programmers can offer customized services.

We are speeding toward having what researcher Nicholas Negroponte has called "The Daily Me," media tailored in every conceivable way to our individualized preferences (see "The Daily Me," April).

This is progress. Isn't it?

Joseph Turow isn't so sure, and he has written a valuable, thoughtful book explaining his doubts.

In his view, the media are creating "the electronic equivalents of gated communities," separating society into narcissistic, potentially hostile camps with less and less reason to interact and work for a common good. The culprit, says Turow, is advertising and its fine-tuned genius for reaching niche markets with a variety of tactics, including:

• "Signaling," using media messages and images to lure desired people into an audience and screen others out;

• "Relationship marketing," fostering a special alliance with customers by gathering and employing massive information about individual behaviors and buying habits;

• "Target-driven happenings," sponsoring events like sports tournaments or music festivals to connect with audiences outside traditional advertising
avenues.

These tools let marketers finely sort society by "demographic, attitudinal, behavioral and geographical features." While targeting has always gone on, Turow argues that today's technology allows hyper-sophisticated "audience-slicing" that fundamentally shifts the balance away from "society-making media," which are unifying, to "segment-making media," which are divisive.

Instead of being viewed as a mass culture with some internal subcategories, we are defined by a whole new colorful constellation of classes: the "furs and station wagons" vs. the "shotguns and pickups," the "inner-directed" vs. the "need-driven," "belongers" vs. "survivors," "materialists" vs. "nesters."

The effect is "to surround individuals with mirrors of a world created for them or, at least, people like them," Turow writes. The danger is that people become so attached to their own groups that they come to misunderstand and even resent others.

"The social price," Turow concludes, "may be alienation, reduced social mobility, anger and fear of others." Moreover, technology may aggravate the divisive effects by subordinating actual communities to virtual ones. "People may increasingly feel that links to individuals in their immediate space and time — people they work with, see in stores or on the streets — are not nearly as important as their far-flung virtual communities."

A University of Pennsylvania communications professor, Turow thoroughly documents target marketing's evolution, and he clearly delineates his concern about its potential social costs.

At times, though, "Breaking Up America" comes across as breathlessly naive — as if we should be aghast at the smoking-gun revelation that advertisers prefer some customers to others.

More important, I wish the book had grappled in more detail with the consequences Turow fears. Once Turow has set up the problem, he offers less than two pages of pale recommendations, suggesting, for example, that consumers begin "going out of their way to use media not intended for them" or try "making it difficult for advertisers to label them."

But deeper matters arise from Turow's argument. You can make a strong case that our communities and society have long depended on central, shared media sources. Will these sources go quietly into oblivion? Or do they have the regenerative power to adapt to changing conditions and defend their "society-making" role?

Couldn't segmented media and central media coexist, each serving different needs? Turow contends that the needs of advertisers tend to dictate media formats; by that, he may be implying that central media will wither if advertisers need them less and less. But what if society has trouble functioning without them? One possibility is that the very increase in segmented media might raise, rather than reduce, the need for at least some central sources that consumers can rely on together.

So far, society has shown a bottomless appetite for media of all stripes, specialized as well as general. It doesn't necessarily follow that the rise of segmented media will cause us to desert those media we enjoy in common, or lose our capacity to balance private and community interests.

"Breaking Up America" doesn't dwell deeply on this line of analysis, but it does take the first step. The electronic gated community is a powerful metaphor, and we still have time to think it through, together.

Stepp, AJR's senior editor, teaches at the University of Maryland College of Journalism.