Flavors of Regional Advertising
Madison, Wisconsin
The advertisements in the Dane County Regional Airport, which services Wisconsin’s capital, are not for you or I. In the Dane County airport you will find dictation solutions that will help your doctors write visit notes more quickly. You will find software to automate privileging, to file reimbursements to your general ledger, to setup text reminders for your patients.
Well, you won’t. The advertisements are not for you, they are for the CEO of CVS, Mayo, Kaiser, Cleveland Clinic, all major healthcare systems that use Epic’s electronic medical record. Epic is the largest software company that you have never heard of. Employing 10,000 Wisconsinites, Epic runs the premier electronic medical record in the country, and once a year healthcare C-suites flock to Madison to attend Epic’s annual users’ group meeting. The ads in the airport hope to catch the imagination and pocketbook of these CEOs, CNOs, CIOs, CMIOs as they catch their flights back home.
Last year, the pandemic lead Epic to cancel this conference. The annual convening of healthcare executives was online only. In 2020, the advertisements in Dane County Regional Airport had an audience that never showed up.
Los Angeles, California
Down the street, by LA City College, there’s a For Your Consideration (FYC) for Tom Hanks’s new movie, Greyhound. This is Apple TV+’s big shot to win its first Oscar, and the FYC ad pleads for you to consider, this awards season, nominating Greyhound for Best Picture and Tom Hanks for Best Actor. If you, like most residents of East Hollywood, have yet to be inducted into the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, or are not one of the select members of the HFPA, then I suppose you could consider watching it, but you are of little use to Apple TV+. Maybe Angelina Jolie sometimes is chauffeured by here—it’s no neighborhood for the stars, but Los Feliz, her residence, is not too far away. Maybe she’ll see the ad and be able to make better use of it.
These ads are omnipresent. When it’s not the Oscars that Los Angeles is considering, it’s the Emmys or the Grammys. They crop up in South Central as often as Little Tokyo and Downtown. Just remember, you may watch what Tinsel Town produces, but the industry always has itself as its most enraptured audience.
San Francisco, California
In 2019, I visited SF. It was in the ride from the airport that the first seeds of this post were planted. The billboards buttressing the 101 hawked new gig economy apps, new productivity software, and social media offerings trying to dethrone a wounded, limping Facebook.
I mentioned to my Lyft driver how fascinating this was to me, the local flavor of advertisements. I told her about the Dane County airport, the For Your Consideration ads in South Central. She was a long time resident of the Bay Area, and said that she noticed when these sorts of billboards started appearing. Silicon Valley didn’t always have the Bay as its elite test market, a place where new forms of labor law violations could live in our pockets.
There’s at least some comfort that these advertisements are directed at you and I, and not at movie producers, healthcare CEOs, venture capitalists. They’re for us, whether we like it or not. If we want cheap labor or if we want to give our labor away cheaply, San Francisco’s billboards can guide us.