I buy this newspaper and cut out and file my column. Isolating myself from the local media has made me very happy. I only miss it on occasion when someone I know died. If the person was close to me, I get text so I’m okay. Those regrets are minimal.
Why don’t I watch the local stations? Frankly, they drive me up the wall. It’s the local programming that I find so disturbing. I can’t stand the way they talk, the way they look, they seem to be talking to someone else, not to me. Of course! Everyone is talking to the masses.
Mass Communications – that’s what the course was called when it was introduced in 1961 at Maryknoll College. It meant exactly that but in the American sense. In America the masses are middle class, the biggest social group with enough money to buy necessities. They did not hope to communicate with the poor, though they were there, nor with the rich, who were also there. These two groups were considered incidental. The media then simply wanted to communicate with the mass that had enough money to buy necessities. Why this profile? Because media knew they needed advertising to support themselves and advertisers were interested in informing the masses about their products, which they might want to buy. That is the dynamic. Media is key. It comes up with programming that appeals to specific groups. Then they sell spots in these programs to advertisers who don’t have anything to say on the program content but who want the attention of the audience drawn to their product. That was how it was in the beginning.
Now we have decided to interpret the word "mass" differently. When we speak about the "masses" we mean demographically, classes D and E. They are very poor, very helpless, have no education or only a little and a bad one, and their values are warped. Most important of all, they have little money so we sell sachet packs to them distributed in sari-sari stores who have developed their own system of selling tingi. They are very price conscious and are always drawn to the lowest price. Why advertise to them? You can direct sales promotions and price-offs but there is no need to advertise to them. It’s a waste of the advertiser’s money. But you see, the advertisers in this country fail to look at the buying power. They look at the numbers. If 60 percent of Filipinos are poor, that gives you 51.6 million in the D-E classes. That number seems so big. But what is their buying power? Very low.
Also, if we decide to keep our programming focused on this market because there are so many of them, we have another basic question to answer: do we cater to their ignorance or do we hope to improve them? Without a thought I would say we should hope to improve them but only I think this way apparently because most networks just decide to cater or pander to their ignorance. They do nothing to try to improve them. So what does TV and some of the tabloids do? They work at preserving the level of ignorance out there. Never mind, they rationalize, it brings in the ratings, meaning only more poor people are watching the show and ratings are the basis for selling to advertisers who bank on those numbers and pay roughly P250,000 (rate card) for every thirty-seconder ad that might be watched by people who have little power to buy.
Therefore the shows go on, the ignorance goes on. And the advertising? Hey, everyone knows there is no surefire way of tracking advertising’s effectivity. Pull out your ads for a year and nothing will change in terms of your sales. Take my word for it. I had 32 years in advertising.
I think we should refocus the meaning of "masses" to the original: the mass of people with enough money to buy basic necessities. In the Philippines, given a population of 86 million people, 60 percent belong to D-E and 5 percent belong to Class A. You only have 45 percent of the population to address, let’s round that off to 40 million but they have much more buying power than the original 60 percent and they are smarter. You can have smarter TV programs addressed to them, which they will watch. The D-Es will watch as well when there is not much else that caters to them and their learning levels will be pulled up. They will learn more. Maybe when they do, they will earn more. They will acquire some intelligence instead of the usual abominably stupid noontime shows I glance on local TV.
I write this because we have changed. Once upon a time local TV was good. Now it is so bad that I am jubilant in my little world that I have created myself by severing myself from watching local media to surrounding myself with cable. I wish I could watch local media but given the quality of the programs, never mind. I have changed, found my solution, I am happy. I just wish my happiness would extend to more people. Maybe to the masses?