Forget push media: Pagers seem to have made the leap from fashion accessory for urban drug dealers to one-to-one communication medium for advertisers. MTV Tuesday announced the MTV Pager Network, a combination marketing vehicle and information service that will be delivered directly to baggy-jean pockets across the country. Marketers call it an innovative new way to reach young adults; critics say it's the spam of the airwaves.
"Paging has become an acceptable way for young adults to keep in touch with friends and family members," explains MTV vice president of consumer products Lisa Silfen. "We see pagers as a good business opportunity ... it's part of their everyday life."
Essentially, the MTV pager will be a fully functioning numeric pager; the "Network" parts kicks in several times a month, when pager owners around the country will get beeped with an 800-number. If they call that number, they'll pick up "special messages" from MTV: contest information, special promotions and giveaways, programming information, and music news. MTV fans will be able to purchase their MTV-designed pagers - the Outrageous (chartreuse), Liquid (blue) or Carbon (gray) models, complete with MTV logo - at "competitive prices" at your local pager depot.
Pager usage for teens in the US has risen dramatically in recent years. According to Motorola's numbers, more than 40 million people in the US currently use pagers; despite bans by many schools that associate beepers with drug dealers, 14 percent of those users are teenagers. That audience coincides perfectly with MTV's core audience.
The network is similar to a successful promotion Mountain Dew ran last summer, in which wired-up Dew drinkers could buy a cheap Dew Beeper (courtesy, again, of Motorola) with 10 proofs-of-purchase. Subsequent pages would then send them to the phones to claim prizes from sponsors including ESPN, Sony Music, Universal Studios, and MTV. Unlike Mountain Dew's one-time promotion (which shipped 500,000 pagers), MTV's new network is intended to be a permanent fixture.
MTV is defining the pager system as an information network - a way "for us to communicate and keep in touch with young adults," as Silfen explains. However, that communication is primarily limited to MTV's occasional beeps and prerecorded messages (although Silfen promises that the upcoming mtvpager.com Web site will contain more interactive features). As such, that "network" label is exactly what watchdog groups like the Center for Media Education find objectionable. Like Mountain Dew's campaign, which garnered protests from advertising critics, the MTV Pager Network is seen as an insidious creeping of marketing into the pockets of unaware teenagers, and disguising advertisements as information.
"There's a concern when advertisements become an extension of the person themselves," says Shelly Pasnick, director of children's policy at the Center for Media Education. "Companies need to learn to be responsible: Just because you can doesn't mean you should - marketing is becoming more and more aggressive, especially when it comes to young people."
Still, MTV reps say they don't think what they're doing is stealthy - Silfen points out that MTV pager owners don't have to call the 800-numbers. Additionally, they're going to be careful not to beep during problematic hours.
Says Silfen, "We are sensitive to the fact that young adults are in school, so we don't page during school hours - just after school and weekends. We don't want to be an intrusion in people's lives."
