The Economics of School Bus Advertising

As the economic pressures on school districts intensify, more and more are considering turning to school bus advertising as a way of ameliorating their budget woes. The impulse is understandable, but it would be great if more school boards did their homework before deciding to make compulsory exposure to school bus ads a part of children’s school day. In addition to being ethically unsound, school bus ads just don’t pay.

Consider the case of Sumner County, Tennessee: the Board of Education has just filed a lawsuit against 1st Class Marketing for failing to properly pay the school district for ads sold on the district’s buses. The board’s contract with the marketing firm called for 60% of ad sales to go to the district. But to date, they’ve only received $5,422 of more than $47,000 in ad sales, so they are suing for the remaining $22,875 they claim they are owed.

So in a best-case scenario, the Sumner County board will recover that money and hopefully its court costs. That means the district would generate $28,297 in revenue from school bus advertising for school year 2010-11.

Now I know $28K is nothing to sneeze at, but let’s put that in perspective. The district’s annual budget is $180 million a year. In the best case, the school bus ads will account for about .015 percent of the district’s annual budget. Or to put it another way: ads will generate about $1.03 for each of the 27,369 students in the district. Sumner County spent $6,577 per student last school year.

And that’s if everything turns out right. If the board is unable to recoup the money it’s owed, or if it accrues significant legal fees, or if it has to devote more staff time to the dispute, the ads could actually cost the district money.

The numbers for Sumner County are consistent with what I’ve seen other places. If districts sell ad space on their buses, it’s fair to say they can expect to generate between $.50 and $1.50 per student each year.

I’m often asked, “Isn’t it better to allow school bus advertising than to lay off dozens of teachers?” It’s a compelling and heartbreaking hypothetical, but one that has little to do with the real choices school districts are facing. A better question for educators would be: “Are you really willing to sell out your students for a dollar a kid?”
Read more!

The Next BusRadio? by Josh Golin

Haven’t we been down this road before? A few years ago, it was BusRadio promising to make school buses safer and calmer with its student-targeted radio broadcasts. Now it’s television that marketers claim will soothe the beast. From the Dallas Morning News:

Television can be a ready baby sitter in the living room, but will it work on school buses?

The Garland school district is experimenting with playing educational videos on a school bus to help cut discipline problems.

For $1,500 per bus, Carrollton-based AdComp Systems installs a 26-inch flat screen TV at the front of the bus. The screen plays videos supplied by NASA, the Discovery network, History Channel and others.

The similarities between BusRadio – which closed its doors last September after a four-year campaign by CCFC and Obligation, Inc. – and Bus-Ed-Safe-TV (BEST) are striking. Like BusRadio, BEST is claiming it will improve student behavior and touting its plan to air safety messages and PSAs in its pitch to school districts while downplaying its commercial content. The Dallas Morning News is even reporting that BEST will have no commercials.

Even if that were true, it’s still a terrible idea. At some point we’re going to need to stand up to the flat-screen invasion and the ubiquitous blaring TV's that compete for our attention and with our conversations at seemingly every turn. Since children 8-18 already spend 7.5 hours a day with media and excessive screen time is linked to poor school performance, keeping televisions off of school buses might be a good place to start.

And just as with BusRadio – which once boasted on its website for advertisers that it would “take targeted student marketing to the next level” – it’s clear the underlying purpose of BEST is to deliver a captive audience of students to advertisers. The BEST website includes a section of “ideal partnerships” which include “targeted content partners” and “commercial sponsorships.”

As for the claim there will be no commercials, the website says only that BEST won’t run “Direct commercial ads that parents can object to and are not good for kids” or air violence or sexually explicit material. That’s not setting the bar very high.

As we learned with BusRadio, it’s not just the content that parents object to – it’s the very business model of forcing children to consume media and marketing on a school bus. Before the BEST team proceeds any further, they should do their homework. They could start with the more than 1,000 comments that parents submitted to the FCC in opposition to BusRadio, or by reading how parents in Louisville, Montgomery County, and cities and towns around the country organized to keep the company out of their school districts. Because if BEST, like its failed predecessor, underestimates parents’ determination to keep their school buses commercial-free, it’s sure to be the next BusRadio.
Read more!