The Consumer Trap

Archive for January, 2009

Friday, January 30th, 2009

Toleration Research

Noam Chomsky once said this to Bill Moyers:

MOYERS: Corporations? [Isn't] the capitalist business system’s first priority profit-making for the general welfare, as its defenders say?

CHOMSKY: The chairman of the board will always tell you that he spends his every waking hour laboring so that people will get the best possible products at the cheapest possible price and work in the best possible conditions. But it’s an institutional fact, independent of who the chairman of the board is, that he’d better be trying to maximize profit and market share, and if he doesn’t do that, he’s not going to be chairman of the board any more. If he were ever to succumb to the delusions he expresses, he’d be out.

The same fiction-fact relation applies in marketing research.  Question any big business marketer in public, and s/he will swear marketing research is all about discovering people’s true wants and needs.

That’s a howling lie, of course.  In the real world, marketing research is about finding buttons to push and then ascertaining how much force, in what forms, can be applied to the found buttons.

Consider this important Advertising Age bulletin about the ongoing overclass push to finish subordinating the internet to corporate broadcasting/big business marketing/market totalitarianism:

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — The web is about to get a little more like TV — minus the ad-skipping. ABC.com has started to peddle research that shows online viewers will tolerate shows such as “Grey’s Anatomy” with ads from multiple sponsors, much like TV.

Network programming on the web, whether on ABC.com, CBS.com, TV.com, Hulu or any other distributor, has typically had a single sponsor. Sometimes ABC has featured one national advertiser and one local advertiser. Online programs have also generally had one ad per break, in part to keep viewers from clicking away, and in part to lure marketers to try what was once a new concept.

As a bonus, the networks disable the fast-forward button, so ads can’t be skipped, and since ad recall is higher, they’ve been able to charge higher cost-per-thousand rates than TV. But because there are many fewer ads, online revenue per viewer for the networks is still far below that on TV.

Boosting ad loads
ABC.com has been making noise for some time about boosting ad loads to bring the amount of revenue earned from viewers more in line with TV, and started conducting research early in 2008. “We can actually increase deliver, reach and frequency by looking at a model that will have more sponsors and more ads,” Cheng said at NATPE, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

The ABC/Nielsen research concluded that adding multiple sponsors per ad break had “a minimal effect” on recall and did not affect purchase consideration or ad attentiveness. ABC said the data show that doubling the number of ads within a show from four to eight “did not affect the viewers’ overall experience with the ABC.com player.”

If ABC.com is successful, expect other online players to follow, since demand for online spots in network shows generally outstrips supply. The danger, as MediaVest Worldwide’s Donna Speciale so aptly put it, is finding “that very fine line and balance before we push them over the edge of being pissed.”

The title of this report?

“ABC Says Web Viewers Will Tolerate Twice the Ads”

Nuff said.

Thursday, January 29th, 2009

Astrologer Jeffrey Sachs’ Latest

Jeffrey Sachs is at it again. Having gained fame as a theorist of why mass starvation is better than price inflation in the Second and Third Worlds, Sachs is now telling First Worlders that 21st century capitalism is going to be just peachy keen:

Taking shape, therefore, is nothing less than a new 21st-century model of capitalism itself, one which is committed to the dual objectives of economic development and sustainability, and is organised to steer core technologies to achieve these twin goals.

Consider the challenge of a bankrupt automobile sector, with General Motors and Chrysler on the verge of insolvency, and Ford not far behind. Rather than viewing the crisis merely as a traditional left-right debate over bail-outs versus market-driven bankruptcy, Obama recognised that the near-bankruptcy of the sector calls for a hands-on approach to transform the core of automotive technology itself. In the Obama strategy, GM will not be closed to punish it for past corporate or societal mistakes. It’s worth far too much as a world leader in the electric vehicles of the 21st century.

The work of moving from a few demonstration vehicles to a new mass industry will take a least a decade. The government will have to support research and development, the high costs of early models, public awareness and acceptance, and the supporting infrastructure. In the case of plug-in hybrids, this means a high-performance power grid fed by sustainable power generation, such as solar or wind power, or coal plants that capture and store the carbon dioxide. For fuel cells, it means a new infrastructure of hydrogen filling stations along the interstate highways and in the major cities.

All this, Sachs assures, is being brought to fruition by “a team of scientific and technological advisers of stunning quality, including two Nobel laureates (Steven Chu and Harold Varmus), and longstanding leaders in climate, energy, ecology and cutting-edge technologies.”

And, the good news doesn’t stop there, kids!  “[W]ith America’s technological prowess, and Obama’s pivotal commitment, it [the United States] is likely to jump to the lead.”

So,in Sachs’ professional analysis, we stand not here:

…but here:

This stunningly ignorant and dangerous piffle redoubles my appreciation of Dmitry Orlov’s observation that economists are “astrologers to the wealthy.”

Wednesday, January 28th, 2009

Ah, The Glories of Private Enterprise!

Seems the entrepreneurs who own the Peanut Corporation of America have long been running a “plant linked to a nationwide salmonella outbreak that has killed eight people and sickened more than 500. Turns out these investors also “knew on at least 12 occasions over the past two years that its product was contaminated but sold it anyway.”

Seems the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s scandalously understaffed and underfunded inspection teams finally got around to inspecting the PCA plant in question, and, upon actual examination, have found it to be “not constructed in such a manner as to allow ceilings to to be kept in good repair.”

So, here’s another easy and obvious litmus test for Obama: Mr. President, even if you’re unwilling to start opening public factories to make basic products like peanut butter in modern buildings with maximum product safety, rich-country labor standards, and minimum marketing costs, are you at least going to correct the Reagan Revolution’s long-standing near-ban on the federal inspection of private businesses?

Alas, none other than The New York Times says: “Don’t hold your breath.”

Monday, January 26th, 2009

Why (Most) Movies Suck

The market totalitarians who call themselves “conservatives” are messing their drawers over the very idea of adding $50 million to the laughably puny $145-million annual budget of the National Endowment for the Arts. “Conservatives,” you see, say they think the NEA is a boondoggle.

Contrast this sense of where boondoggles come from with the excellent recent reportage of New Yorker critic Tad Friend on the workings of the corporate capitalist movie studios — where $50 million, by the way, is less than half of what gets spent there on a single movie, a.k.a. “property,” according to Friend.

As Friend reports:

“Studios now are pimples on the ass of giant conglomerates,” one studio’s president of production says. “So at green-light meetings it’s a bunch of marketing and sales guys giving you educated guesses about what a property might gross.

This, of course, means that:

Marketing considerations shape not only the kind of films studios make but who’s in them—gone are lavish adult dramas with no stars, like the 1982 “Gandhi.”

Even within this situation, which is well-known to industry insiders, if not the general public, there is no doubt what corporate capitalist movies are:

Marketers and filmmakers are often quietly at war. “The most common comment you hear from filmmakers after we’ve done our work is ‘This is not my movie,’ ” Terry Press, a consultant who used to run marketing at Dreamworks SKG, says. “I’d always say, ‘You’re right—this is the movie America wants to see.’ ”

Friend finds the resulting imperatives “unexpected,” but nonetheless does a great job listing them. Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

Announcing the Consumer Trap Photo Gallery!

Over yonder on the right, you can see that I’m launching a photo gallery to allow folks to share their own photos documenting the themes of this blog.  Take a look, and do share!

Sunday, January 25th, 2009

Obamanocchio #2

The editors of The New York Times on Tuesday declared that, “In his Inaugural Address, President Obama gave them the clarity and the respect for which all Americans have hungered.”

And in that Address, there were these words from the new President himself:  “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

Given all this emphasis on clarity, ideals, respect, and making honest choices, consider the grayness and evasion we’re getting instead:

First, take the case of the promised closing of Guantanamo.  Below the headlines, that is being described in these terms by the Obama Administration:

When he ordered the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to be shut down, Mr. Obama put off the tough decision of what to do with the terrorism suspects there, a delay that his senior adviser, David Axelrod, attributed to the complexity of the issue — the same argument Mr. Bush used to keep the prison open.

“That is an enormously complicated situation,” Mr. Axelrod said Friday afternoon in an interview in his West Wing office, adding: “Obviously, you can’t solve problems overnight. But what you can do is signal a sense of motion, a sense of ferment and activity and direction. And I think that he is doing that.”

Of course, there is nothing complicated at all about Guantanamo. The United States illegally abducted scores of people it thinks are prone to terrorism and has illegally warehoused them for years, in the starkest possible contradiction to our alleged ideals and the simple rule of law.

Now, in order to live up to the rule of law, somebody has to admit that past violations of it have heightened ordinary Americans’ chances of being victims of future terrorism. Being illegally arrested and imprisoned does not generally calm one down.

Is Obama willing to show us clarity and respect and tell us the simple truth here?

Obviously not. Instead, we’re getting promise about the future designed to “signal a sense of motion, a sense of ferment and activity and direction.” Below the signals, there lies “the same argument Mr. Bush used to keep the prison open.”

And what about the appointment of a Raytheon Corporation lobbyist as the #2 overseer at the Pentagon?

“It appears to be a black-and-white case. I am unaware of what makes it so gray in the mind of President Obama,” said Winslow T. Wheeler, a former congressional budget staffer now with the Center for Defense Information, on the president’s choice of Raytheon lobbyist William J. Lynn to serve as Deputy Secretary of Defense. Wheeler said it would take a “gigantic loophole” to squeeze Lynn, a top executive for defense giant Raytheon who registered to lobby for the company as recently as last June, into the office.

Obama’s executive order, which he signed Tuesday, would appear to ban lobbyists like Lynn from working in executive branch jobs related to the work of their former employers. Moreover, it would force appointees to recuse themselves from any business their former employers might have an interest.

Yes, it “would appear.”