A Price to Obsolescence Denial – Part II

This is part II of an essay posted yesterday tracing the modern history of tourism along with that sector’s seeming inability to exercise what the late Peter Drucker called “systematic abandonment” as it relates to giving obsolete layers of organizations a proper burial.

I left off yesterday just before WWII created a lull in the widespread embrace of destination marketing organizations.  States had begun to advertise in the 1930s (the only element of marketing widely understood at the time.)

But first they had to purge their roadsides of billboard blight.  They also discovered another reason that they had the “cart before the horse” when it came to marketing.

States such as North Carolina had very little idea of what they could offer tourists.  The federal government came to the rescue again, as it had when it incentivized the building of roads.

A Depression-era program designed to put people to work rallied teams of authors and artists in each state to compile and illustrate comprehensive guide books that were then left to each respective state to publish.

In January 1937, my native Idaho’s was the first of the guides to be printed.  The remote mountain state had gone from having 5 of its 2,255 miles of roadway paved in 1922 to having 2,176 miles paved or oiled by 1936.

By the end of 1937, 400 autos a day were using the segment of the North & South Highway between Boise and Coeur d’Alene alone and officials were promoting improvements as a “means of attracting more tourists to Idaho.”

When first completed in 1927, the North & South’s terminus was at Weiser, about 74 miles short of Boise.

That segment had been completed by the time the state’s guide was published, making it possible for travelers to drive to and from Bonner’s Ferry, 30 miles shy of the Canadian border.

These state guides each catalogued detailed histories, inventories of flora, fauna, geology and archeology as well as point to point descriptions of things to see and do in each community.

Published in 1939, the guide book for North Carolina showed communities what was possible and planted the seeds for the post-World War II emergence of visitor promotion as we know it today.

That first visitors guide took nearly four years to research and produce with writers working out of eight different cities across the state.

But returning GIs across the country after World War II were impatient.

Tourism entrepreneurs, fearful states would not resume tourism marketing, began to instead organize another layer of associations, hoping to apply pressure.

Had they investigated more closely, they may have understood that the paradigm was shifting to community-based destination marketing organizations.

Key to strategic thinking is to look back in order to see forward.  A few did and jumped ahead of the shift to community-based tourism promotion.

Within five to ten years, the statewide tourism associations began to struggle for membership, as the idea of community destination marketing organizations rapidly spread and then exploded in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The shift was hastened in North Carolina when one of those returning GIs, an aviator who had survived two plane crashes in the war, pioneered the local option occupancy tax as a means to self-fund community destination marketing.

By the early 1980s, even rural communities and counties were organizing DMOs.  The vast majority of travelers by the end of that decade were destined for a specific city, town or county.

That’s when meetings began to be held to determine what do with those middle-ring associations created in that span after the war.  People who were unaware of the paradigm shift that made them obsolete only a little more than a decade later were perplexed.

At a meeting in the early 1990s to decide what to do with that layer of associations created in the 1950s, a friend of mine who worked for Biltmore at the time gently explained why that layer should be laid to rest, what Nancy Lublin calls “death by success.”

He explained that tourism organizations were by then far more connected to their respective community destination marketing organization rather than statewide or even national tourism-related associations.

It was one of a half dozen such meetings I was asked to attend over the years.  But there were always a few on both sides of the paradigm shift who didn’t accept that “pulling the plug,” could be both celebratory and merciful, preferring life support instead.

It isn’t a phenomenon unique to tourism.  There are many such organizations on life support in every community, kept there by a few people who can never seem to say goodbye and forcing many times their number to pay the price of their reticence.

In my experience, those who are reticent to pull the plug are otherwise reasonable people who also often struggle with anything strategic in nature, giving them a general lack of understanding of patterns or distinctions.

I suspect that the productivity of society in general is loaded down much more than it needs to be, merely by the reluctance to shutter the obsolete.

For those who are near-sighted when it comes to recognizing paradigm shifts from either shore, they must seem so gradual as to barely even exist.

But in fact, those who do see patterns and distinctions long before they are apparent know that the tipping point can be blindingly fast when it comes.

It is why those who perpetuate roadside billboards fail to grasp that while that form of media began its march into obsolescence in the 1930s, it recently reached its rapid conclusion over just 48 months.

It explains why progressive tourism leaders pushed for them to be banned 76 years ago, while a handful today can’t bear to see them go.

But just as we kept an old typewriter stashed in the back rooms of offices as well as fax machines more than 20 years after either had been useful, we are forced to keep layers of organizations on life support for the few who can’t bear their demise.

It is the price we pay for those who are not strategic.

Finding Myself Going In Opposite Directions

As devices go, I find myself going in opposite directions.

For different reasons, my cell phone just got a lot bigger and my tablet smaller.  The iPhone 6+ is a lot easier to read and the mini-tablet is a lot easier to handle.

Research I will get to suggests I will soon be shedding some devices.

For me, the size of the keys on the keyboard of the 6+ is more important than making or receiving phone calls, partly because when I do, I am in the Jeep where it happens via the sound system or on speaker mode.

Very rarely do I raise the phone to my ear anymore and the larger size works just fine when I do.

Even for people north of age 65, such as me, only 18% use their cell phones a lot for phone calls compared to 38% of the general population, according to Gallup.

Among Americans overall, 18% rarely use cellphones a lot to make or receive phone calls, compared to 27% who rarely use them for text messages and 29% who don’t use them to read or send emails.

More telling though, is that more than half of Americans now rarely, if ever, use a landline.  More than 64% rarely, if ever, use a landline at work now.

Even among those in my age group, only 17% still frequently use a landline from home.  Of course, all but 7% of those under age 30 are probably looking up to find out what a landline is.

By the way, for anyone who wears a leather belt-loop holster to carry their phone when not in use, I have a recommendation for where to get one, especially for an iPhone 6 or 6+, and even more so if you use a protective case.

Alyssa Nott, an artist up in Fort Wayne, Indiana makes these to your specification and she does wonderful work.

In 2012, friends who learned I had read several books on my cellphone during one of my annual cross-country trips since retiring five years ago, thought I was crazy.

I didn’t realize I was among only 8% of people my age who read e-books, available from numerous apps including one from local bookstores, and even as loaners from some public libraries now.

But that same study showed that by 2012, a quarter of Americans who read e-books did so on a cellphone, including 41% of those ages 16-29.

I always read a bit before going to sleep, often just reversing the screen from white with black type to black with only the type backlit.  I have found myself, without realizing it, using the iPhone 6+ instead of the tablet.

It isn’t inconceivable that I won’t buy another television either.  I am one of the nearly 8 million Americans who only stream when it comes to television and I have to say, watching on an iPhone 6+ is pretty impressive.

Those who measure television viewership are scrambling right now to do a much better job of capturing metrics across all screens as well as digging deeper into things like engagement.

A report this month showed that mobile apps are surpassing television in minutes per day.  In part, this is because television viewership is “graying,” and nowhere more than cable.

Click on the infographic shown in this post to see an illustration.  Click on the chart at this link to see the growth in “app events” (action completed inside apps, not just opening and closing them) just since I retired at the end of 2009.

Time spent on mobile devices in the US grew 9.3% over the last nine months to an average of almost three hours a day, while time spent on television was flat at 2 hours and 48 minutes per day.

But a Nielsen executive last month noted that the drop in prime-time television ratings is the result of people watching on other devices.  It just hasn’t reached agreement on how that will be counted.

This sounds a little like newspaper executives a decade ago who were arguing that circulation has been level since 1991, just as advertising revenues, which translate more to the bottom line, were going into a free fall that continues today.

Millennials still watch television, just not traditional television and especially not television news.

By location, 98% view video at home on a smartphone as do 58% at a friend or significant others home.  Half view it on a smartphone while on vacation, more than a third while commuting, and a fourth will at a restaurant or bar.

They are watching television, just not on a television set, and just not live.  My career in community marketing reaches back to a time when it was important to note whether hotel rooms had a television, a color television.

I can now see the time when having an in-room television will be as obsolete as that landline telephone they still have.

At What Point Does A Product Or Service Become Useless?

The scientific results of a poll showing how often outdoor billboards are actually used makes you wonder how much longer we can afford them.

The poll showed that less than one in ten North Carolinians use them a few times a week to decide on a product or service, one in five use them a few times a month and nearly seven out of ten never use them.

A hundred years ago they may have seemed quaint or humorous but already states were curbing them. At what point do they become obsolete? At what point are they no longer worth the blight they bring to roadsides and communities?

At what point do we pull the plug because North Carolina’s scenery is so much more valuable as a cornerstone of the state’s $17 billion tourism economic sector?

At what point will the economic value of the trees and vegetation swathed so they are visible be worth more than the billboards in their ability to remove pollutants from the air and clear storm run-off?

At what point do advertisers realize that it isn’t worth reaching such a tiny segment of the population while irritating the the vast proportion who responded to the poll that outdoor billboards are a detraction and distraction?

At what point will legislators and local officials say enough is enough, even for the small amount of “parasitic” property right involved.

At what point will outdoor billboard owners take management guru Peter Drucker’s advice and pull the plug on them as an obsolete service?

We now have a benchmark so will it be when the proportion of population that finds them completely useless inches up from 68% to 75%? It is only a matter of time.

If I were in or owned stock in a business that owns outdoor billboards, I’d be divesting as fast as possible. Being in the business of irritating people doesn’t have a future.

In the meantime, to keep billboards out of landfills, let ReMakes, an incubator for environmentally-sensitive consumer products, recycle them into hundreds of unique placemats.