Transit TV Goes Dark

April 18, 2009 by Dave Haynes

I really want to take offense to the thousands of media planners that historically and continuously espouse this rhetoric, quote, “But bus riders are not necessarily the audience a lot of advertisers are after.” Who in the heck started this anti-American, anti-middle-class, anti-service workers, anti-civil servants industry B.S. Listen up people, when we travel to our digital signage conferences in Orlando, Las Vegas, NY, or any other big convention hub, who do you think is carrying your luggage upstairs to your room, who do you think is changing your freaking bed sheets and cleaning your bathrooms, who do you think is preparing your food? Serivce workers making $10/hour and riding the bus. Who do you think is teaching 90% of your English-speaking American kids? Public School Teachers making $28K per year? Many of whom ride the bus to and from school because they can’t afford a BMW, or dare not walk into a public school sporting a Coach- handbag. America was and is still built on the backs & hands of consumers living and working in ethnically-diverse and underserved DMAs. Now, the last time I checked, all these so-called “unworthy demographics” support McDonalds daily, support Walmart, Kmart, Costco, CVS, Walgreens, Publix, Safeway, Kroger; buy diapers from J&J, toilet-tissue and tampons from Kimberly-Clarke, brush their teeth with Colgate, shave their facial hair with Gillette, take millions in Rx and OTCs, buy breakfast juice from Tropicana/Minute Maid (Coke or Pepsi??), etc…I don’t have a calculator, but my tabulation just from this brief list is topping $1.2 trillion in consumer disposable income. Yes I repeat, “Consumer Disposable Income.