Controversial youth marketing firm Skoollive attempting to put electronic billboards into schools.
From Jim Metrock:
Skoollive recently published this video in an effort to make school officials more comfortable with their controversial, in-school marketing company. If your school district is thinking about bringing billboard advertising into your school hallways, please take a moment and watch Skoollive’s “feel good” video, then consider reading my remarks about the video.
The opening tells school board members that Skoollive wants to turn their schools into “LiveSkools.” I have no idea what that term means. Does “LiveSkool” mean a school that is completely saturated with Skoollive advertising? Why would a school want to refer to itself as any kind of “skool”? When these youth marketers named their company “Skoollive” it was a tipoff that they were not primarily concerned with education.
Don’t wait for it. The simple idea is to generate money by placing static advertisements and video commercials in front of a captive audience of schoolchildren.
This image should raise a significant privacy concern for school officials and parents. No surprise that Skoollive and its advertising clients will ask students for their personal information. Everybody OK with that??
Kiosks are going to make students want to be in school? Really? You’re kidding me, right? One would have to have a pretty low opinion of young people to believe that.
It’s great to put a sentence like this in white letters on a black background. It almost makes you believe this is indeed the way these marketers see it. If this was true, why would Skoollive create a product – an electronic billboard/kiosk – whose main purpose is to distract students in the hallway. For Skoollive to earn any revenue, the advertising has to be seen by students. For the advertisements or commercials on Skoollive’s machines to be seen by busy students, the ads have to attract the attention of the students. Bright lights?, ever-changing screens?, loud sounds?, eye-catching images? When a students stare at a product being advertised on the front of a Skoollive billboard/kiosk that means they are not doing something else. Not talking to a friend? Not getting that book from their locker? Not getting to their next class on time?
You might not be able to read what is on this billboard, but it says, “Quote of the Day.” I can’t read what the quote is, but I am sure it is inspiring and motivational. The thing is – the company is not showing you a typical advertisement on the screen. This quote earns Skoollive zero dollars. Skoollive is being deceptive by creating a false idea of what these billboard/kiosks look like in action.
I’m sorry, there is an error in the above image. Please remove the word “society” to “our bank account.” Apologies to any who were inconvenienced by this mistake. Seriously, this $500 check is purposefully misleading. Skoollive wants to create the impression this check is the school’s share of Skoollive’s ad revenue, but it can’t be. Skoollive hasn’t signed up enough advertisers and hasn’t been in schools long enough to earn enough “net revenue” to share. If this was indeed a revenue sharing check, Skoollive would have provided the contractually required documentation** to the school. There is no documentation. Skoollive simply wanted to create some good publicity by giving some money to its early sign-up schools. They are hoping pictures like this one will help recruit new schools to sign up.
So the picture they use to underscore the goal of making students “want to learn” is of a student holding an electronic advertising machine (aka Skoollive billboard/kiosk). This marketing company has a lot of gall to lecture school board members on how to motivate their students.
There is no advertising on the front of this billboard/kiosk which is funny since advertising is the main purpose of the machine. This image was selected by Skoollive to make school officials feel positive towards the bizarre idea of having multimedia advertising playing non-stop in school hallways.
Excuse me, but if you had two identical schools and the only difference was one had commercial advertising, being seen and HEARD constantly in the hallways, and the other school had no such distractions, I can tell you which one parents, teachers, and yes students would find more desirable.
Unfortunately, there are some schools that will jump at getting ANYTHING “digital” into their schools. Something digital gives the appearance of a modern school even if it is a needless distraction during the school day. School boards that do their homework, won’t fall for Skoollive’s digital pitch.
Sahuarita High School is given a $1,200 check for just one month of Skoollive advertising! However, don’t get excited about signing up with Skoollive yet. This check is not the contractually promised ad revenue sharing. I’ll post an article soon about this photo and the situation at Sahuarita High.
Don’t you want to turn your school into a “LiveSkool”? Don’t you want your school hallways to be filled with commercial sales pitches? Well then, call this number within the next thirty minutes. Operators and youth marketers are standing by.
