by Dave Zornow
It was hyped by politicians and local newscasters as an accident, once averted, waiting to happen again. But it turned out to be “more like Y2K than [and less like] the Bay of Pigs,” according to FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein.
Yet, news reports say that over 700,000 phone calls were received on digital conversion hotlines last week from angry, confused and panicked people. Who are these folks — and why did they wait until the last minute?
Nielsen’s pre-digital ana-laggard profile said there were about 2-3 million home unready for the digital transition last Friday. There were likely to be older (or less than 35), African-American or Hispanic. Unfortunately, the news media failed to discovered any black latino seniors who were under 35 years old. This is quite a disappointment from an industry that routinely measures behavior by looking at woman who simultaneously show the media behaviors of consumers that are 18 AND 49 years old.
But local news did find a few folks who fit some of the profile:
- ABC News wrote about Carl Huffman, a 58 year old disabled Seattle aerospace worker, on permanent disability due to receiving a bad blood transfusion which had given him AIDS.
- There was Mr. Freeman, a 53 year old featured in the New York Times. He lives in a homeless shelter and was waiting to see whether he would win a donated converter box at a raffle put on by a community group.
- In the Boston Globe, we learned about 89-year-old Ruth Savage. She couldn’t figure out how to connect her new cables and rescan for new channels despite having helped draw blueprints for the navigation system on Apollo 11.
- Harvey Durrett is a 48-year old on disability who can’t afford to buy a new TV. The Associated Press tracked him down at 6am in Best Buy trying to buy a converter box. “I can’t get anything on my TV now, so I guess I’ll have to go to friends’ houses if I want to watch anything,” he said. He wasn’t alone in the dark, either. Leo Jones, a 79-year-old retired school administrator in Ontario, Calif., was couldn’t watch the Laker finals because he didn’t convert in time.
There’s a bit of a disconnect here — and it’s just not between their sets and their now useless rabbit ears.
Everyone interviewed was elderly or disabled. Not an under-35 black or hispanic in the bunch. Which means the reporters were lazy or Nielsen’s representation for the digital-less was a bit off. There’s probably a little bit of truth to both of those conclusions.
What was lacking from the reporting is WHY — and what we should learn from it as marketers, politicians and concerned family members who have older relatives. If TV is so important to this group (it is) and if The Box has been talking about this transition incessantly for the past year (it was), why wait until the last minute? Twice — as the original deadline was in February.
There’s a lesson here about human behavior. Can someone get back to me when they figure out what it is?
Editor’s Note: As of 6/17, Nielsen says there are still 2.5 million homes who haven’t switched.