The ethically-deficient crew behind BusRadio, looking to take the captive marketing of kids in school “to the next level,” have now put the most damaging of its marketing materials behind a “members-only” firewall. This after a slew of unfriendly press exploring its business model, which is to pipe advertisements for sponsors into school buses. Though BusRadio’s hyped its launch in a few Massachusetts school districts this fall, one has already backed out following parental backlash.
Queries to busradio.com now display a splash page, and access to busradio.net requires a username and password combination. It is extremely difficult to obtain a combination via the sign-up form (more than 85% of all requests are rejected). This content is apparently restricted to “sponsors” (read: ad clients). However, busradio.org is now chock full of information that heralds BusRadio’s efficacy at keeping kids quiet and in their seats.
The company’s site developers were also forward-thinking enough to code the BusRadio domains in such a way as to prevent Google and The Internet Archive from caching any pages. Even more interestingly, BusRadio employees have been directed to scrub references to the company from their MySpace pages, or scrub the pages themselves.
BusRadio is thus attempting to whitewash the Channel One-esque nature of its business in exchange for portrayal as a “bus safety program.” BusRadio’s sugar-daddy, the venture capital firm Sigma Partners, has not been able to raise the full amount of startup funding it had initially planned for. Cutting off BusRadio’s venture capital at this stage in the game, coupled with enough parental revulsion, might very well strangle this bankrupt idea before it can grow any roots.
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