Setting the Wayback Machine to 1995: "Cheap Speech and What It Will Do": What Will Happen to Advertising (Both Commercial and Political)

[This is an excerpt from my 1995 Yale Law Journal article "Cheap Speech and What It Will Do," written for a symposium called "Emerging Media Technology and the First Amendment.) Thirty years later, I thought I'd serialize the piece here, to see what I may have gotten right—and what I got wrong.]

The new technologies will have at least three significant effects on advertising:

First, it will be easier and cheaper to have advertising-free media. Consumers generally don't like commercials on radio and TV, because (unlike in newspapers) the ads interrupt the program content. Some consumers dislike commercials enough that they would be willing to pay extra for advertising-free media, as they now do for some cable movie channels.

Other consumers would prefer to have free (or cheaper) entertainment, and would be willing to sit through the commercials to get it. Still, as the costs of providing services-such as custom-mix cable radio-fall, the amount of advertising on free services will fall, too, as services compete with one another based on how few commercials they have.

Advertisements in newspapers and magazines are less intrusive, so there'll be less pressure to reduce their quantity. Some publications might refuse ads to prove their independence from outside pressure,  but this seems unlikely to become common.

Second, newspapers will lose a vast amount of classified ad revenue. This revenue accounted for forty percent of total newspaper ad revenue in the late 1980's;  one commentator projects it will reach sixty percent by 2000.  But paper classifieds are far inferior, for both buyers and sellers, to electronic classifieds that are untied to any newspaper.

A database of, say, all apartments for rent in the city would be much easier to search through than a newspaper classified section: From a public-access terminal,  the renter could ask for an instant list of all the one-bedroom apartments renting for less than $850 per month within three miles of UCLA, perhaps plus apartments that are a bit cheaper but a bit further, or more expensive but closer.  The list should be more complete, because the information will be easier and cheaper to post. And the list should be timelier—the information will become available as soon as the landlord posts it, and can be removed as soon as the apartment is rented.

Electronic classifieds are better on all counts than paper ones, and newspapers will have to adjust to a huge revenue loss when the paper classifieds stop coming in. {Newspapers can, of course, enter the classified market themselves. But the newspapers won't have any substantial edge over other service providers in this field. And even if a newspaper comes up with a fabulously profitable electronic classified service, the stockholders will probably be hesitant to use this service to subsidize a money-losing print operation.} The loss of classified revenues, coupled with the cost savings and opportunities for extra profits from electronic distribution, should help push newspaper publishers into going electronic.

Third, individualization of the media will let advertisers target customers better than ever before. Instead of one newspaper with ads aimed at several hundred thousand people, each electronically delivered newspaper will have ads calculated to fit the particular subscriber's profile-age, sex, and whatever other information the newspaper gets at subscription time, or can deduce from the mix of stories he's ordered.  The same would be true for the other media.

The greater ease of targeting ads may also change the way political campaigns reach voters. This is already happening: In one political consultant's words, "if you want to talk to women, buy 'Sisters' Saturday night; men, you buy ESPN; seniors, 'Murder She Wrote'; everyone, [the local football team] or '60 Minutes."' Another consultant points out that "yuppies, particularly working mothers … don't watch TV regularly, but do sit in traffic jams-which makes radio a good buy."

When targeting becomes even easier, candidates can speak even more directly to particular voters, with ads specially targeted at those people. This would give voters more information about the issues that matter to them; and voters who want deeper treatment of the issues might get their wish, as campaigns try to avoid alienating them with shallower commercials.

On the other hand, targeted ads might in some ways be worse for the democratic process than mass ads are. The targeted ads might appeal more to parochial interests and prejudices and less to the common good; and candidates might be able to make arguments to small groups that they would rather not make to the public at large. {Of course, the candidate shouldn't create ads that would be too embarrassing if revealed to the public at large. For instance, in the 1990 Minnesota senatorial campaign, a letter was sent to the Jewish community on behalf of then Senator Rudy Boschwitz criticizing his opponent, Paul Wellstone, for marrying a non-Jew and raising his children outside the faith; the strategy appears to have backfired when the ads got a lot of press.}

These are, of course, only tentative guesses; still, it seems likely that the demassification of the mass media will substantially change the way both products and politicians are advertised. To the extent advertising is important to political campaigns, these changes ought to be considered.