Got $6? Then you have enough to buy an ad on cable TV
Published 5:00 am Monday, August 18, 2008
Saysme.tv didn’t invent the loudmouth, but, as the company’s logo indicates, it sure hopes to sell him a megaphone.
The business plan works like this: Saysme.tv offers a service over the Internet that streamlines the submission process for homemade television advertising and offers cheap slices of cable TV time — perhaps as little as $6 for a 25-second spot, assuming you are OK with appearing on CNN Headline News sometime next week in parts of Charlotte, N.C., in the wee hours.
The hope is to get commissions from the legions of small-time commentators, political bloggers and local advertisers, who may have opinions as strong as T. Boone Pickens’ on renewable energy but do not have his millions to bombard the public with them. Instead, the dream goes, there would be millions of individual commentators placing ads a few at time, market by market, either by uploading their own ads YouTube style or choosing from those already hosted at the site. Let the buckshot bombardment begin.
The Web site is a new example of an online phenomenon once considered powerful enough to have its own buzzword — disintermediation — which has been applied to auctions, entertainment and classified ads.
In the cable TV advertising version, no longer would placing an ad be expensive and time-consuming, with its own arcane rituals and legal boilerplate.
Instead, the path from computer screen to TV screen could be nearly smooth, efficient if you prefer, and in a generally accessible price range, though more likely to be around $60 than the occasional $6 slot that one can hunt for on the site.
Combined with video hosts like YouTube, large blogging farms like Blogger and homegrown online news sites, perhaps saysme could cause the incisive adage — freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one — to lose some of its bite.
If it all sounds like the cacophony of the Internet, or a busy commercial street on rush hour, is creeping into offline media outlets, saysme’s chief executive, Lisa Eisenpresser, pleads guilty, only she prefers other words: democracy, marketplace of ideas.
“We are trying to push free speech,” she said, while acknowledging that the ads would still have to conform to the cable companies’ restrictions on content. “I’ll put out the cacophony, and the cream will rise to the top.”