Archive for May, 2009
Saturday, May 30th, 2009
Once Again: Facebook is Evil
I mean this. If you want to make free contributions to market totalitarianism’s Big Brother, keep your Facebook account.
Here’s the real purpose of that account, as reported by Business Week for June 1, 2009:
Advertisers are…interested in understanding individuals. Decoding friendship, many believe, could be the key to getting consumers’ attention. Historically, this wasn’t so hard. Information was in short supply, and by comparison, time was cheap. Not long ago millions waited through entire newscasts just to learn who won a game or what tomorrow’s weather would be. This was ideal for advertisers: They had a captive audience.
For all its popularity, Facebook has yet to prove itself as an advertising platform. Visitors, it seems, focus on their friends and pay scant attention to ads. Few click on them, and advertisers pay pennies for page views. Consequently, Facebook, with its estimated revenue of $300 million this year, brings in scarcely a dime a month per member.
Now we’re swimming in information. We can call up nearly every bit of news, music, and entertainment we want on demand. In fact, there’s so much of it that we need filters to block the boring or irrelevant stuff and help us find the bits we need or desire. This has created what many call the “Attention Economy.” Says Bernardo A. Huberman, director of the Information Dynamics Laboratory at Hewlett-Packard: “The value of most information has collapsed to zero. The only scarce resource is attention.” So how do we figure out where to direct it?
The easiest way is to get tips from friends. They’re our trusted sources. At least a few of them know us better than any algorithm ever could. Little surprise, then, that the companies most eager to command our attention are studying which friends we listen to. Online friendship is a hot focus for Facebook, Google, and Yahoo. They joust to hire leading sociologists, anthropologists, and microeconomists from MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley. Microsoft just established a research division focused on social sciences in Cambridge, Mass.
Statistically, friends tend to behave alike. A couple of years ago researchers at Yahoo found that if someone clicked on an online ad, the people on his or her instant chat buddy list, when served the same ad, were three to four times more likely than average to click on it. It makes sense. Friends share interests.
But it raised lots of questions. Which types of friends have the most meaningful correlations with each other? People have always confided in a small circle of intimates, often only two or three. They’ve also had wider circles of experts for specific advice, whether on cars or cooking. Then there’s a broader circle of acquaintances whose opinions count far less but who can still generate buzz about a new restaurant or senatorial candidate. By studying patterns of interactions on networks—often scrutinizing us only as anonymous bits of data—researchers are working to predict which friends we trust and which we pay attention to in each area of our lives.
In an office above Palo Alto’s University Avenue, a lean 32-year-old PhD from MIT’s Media Lab pores over the data connecting millions of dots. Cameron A. Marlow, a research scientist at Facebook, has perhaps the greatest lab in history for studying [how to exploit] friendship. He can study social media communications including wall posts, shared photos, pokes, and friend requests among 200 million people.
The hope is that if Marlow and his team manage to track the paths of influence among its communities, the company [Facebook] might be able to offer more effective and lucrative advertisements and promotions.
An early step is to separate each user’s friends into clusters. Marlow pulls out a chart illustrating the social network of one of his colleagues, Alex Smith. It shows different groups of dots and their connecting links. One big and busy group represents fellow workers at Facebook. Others are high school friends, family, in-laws, frat brothers. Understanding these types of relationships could provide valuable context.
Marlow’s team recently carried out a study to determine how close we are to our friends online. They looked at how often people clicked on their friends’ news or photos, how often they communicated, and if the communications traveled in both directions. Studying this data, they determined that an average Facebook user with 500 friends actively follows the news on only 40 of them, communicates with 20, and keeps in close touch with about 10. Those with smaller networks follow even fewer. What can this teach advertisers? People don’t pay much attention to most of their online friends. By focusing campaigns on people who interact with each other, they’ll likely get better results.
Remember when capitalism’s apologists used to dismiss the very idea of socialism because of its alleged inherent reliance on social engineering?
Thursday, May 21st, 2009
About Beinggirl…For Real
When you subscribe to insider business rags, you not only get access to some of the truths behind the lies, you also get a better sense of what’s really newsworthy to the minions of Mammon.
Today’s news flash comes via Advertising Age, which broadcast to its subscribers the word that “P&G Social-Media Strategy Increases Tampon Sales,” with the subhead “Marketer Conclusion: Much More Effective Than Advertising.”
Turns out the big news is that the Procter & Gamble conglomerate has created a website called www.beinggirl.com as a Trojan Horse for boosting tampon sales to girls entering puberty.
The site is described as “subtle” by marketing researcher Josh Bernoff.
Take a look, and see what’s considered subtle by our chief cultural engineers.
The only thing I see that looks subtle is the deceptions advanced on the obligatory “About Beinggirl” page, where P&G passes off its vampirical exploitation of pre-teen girls as a form of genuine human concern. While the two and only two true purposes of Beinggirl are 1) boosting P&G sales, and 2) harvesting extremely high-quality marketing data on a key “market segment,” here is what P&G alleges to Beinggirl users:
Being a girl is like being part of a club where everyone knows what you’re going through…at least on some level. Girls have fun. Girls have opinions. Girls have a lot of questions about stuff like PMS, dating, their bodies and even serious subjects like addiction and abuse – just about anything you can think of that has to do with being a girl.
That’s why we created beinggirl – a place where girls can come together to learn, share, communicate with each other and have loads of fun with games, quizzes, polls and lots more. It’s also THE place to be for the hottest free samples from Always and Tampax, to name a few.
Beinggirl.com, for girls, by girls!
The only line here that’s not a calculated lie is “It’s also THE place to be for the hottest free samples from Always and Tampax, to name a few.”
Such “social-media” marketing is the future. As Bernoff report, P&G reports this campaign has produce a marketing ROI that’s 4 times greater than it’s convention advertising efforts.
Without seeing P&G’s background research, one can only guess at the real business strategy on which this 4x profit result rests. Based on my experience with such secret materials, my best guess is that P&G knows that kids generally aspire to be older than they are. I’d wager that the real targets of this website are not the reported “12 and 13-year old girls just starting menstruation,” but the 10- and 11-year-olds aspiring to become cool, bleeding, sexy middle schoolers and asking mom to start stockpiling P&G tampons, etc., in anticipation of the big day. Selling products to people who don’t need them, in other words.
Of course, there’s no way to know this is the real plan. For reasons I explain in my book, corporate marketers are very secretive about their research findings and their resulting plans. And Procter & Gamble is notoriously brutal about its secrets, even by the already tough standards of the trade.
Nonetheless, as Sherlock Holmes often says, “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” P&G is undoubtedly not simply serving girls, as it claims. After all, there was no prior crisis of tamponless girls. Hence, P&G has almost undoubtedly discovered some new way of manipulating their targets into buying more products for some irrational reason(s) known only to it.
To the extent corporate capitalism has time left, this is the kind of thing its planners will be spending their time promulgating, as the world and its pre-teens careen toward the abyss.
How lovely.
At a business forum, I was once brash enough to say that I thought the main cultural impact of television advertising was to teach children that grown-ups told lies for money. How strong, deep, or sustaining can be the values of a civilization that generates a ceaseless flow of half-truths and careful deceptions? (Robert L. Heilbroner)
Wednesday, May 20th, 2009
Dementia at Age 47
Well, he did at least admit as much during his historically dishonest campaign/self-marketing phase: Barack Obama greatly admires Ronald Reagan.
During the marketing phase, Obama tried to pass this off as being about changing “the trajectory of America.” Now we know what codswallop that was.
Now we know that Obama loves Reagan because he IS Reagan 2.0 — a kindly, salable, self-absorbed, well-timed super-stooge for our decrepit, vampirical, Earth-wrecking overclass.
Exhibit A: Consider this pants-melting, hair-graying Reaganesque screamer from Saint Change’s “first 100 days” press conference:
Compare that claim against reality. You might start here. Or perhaps with yesterday’s sickening charade about credit card rape.
As with Reagan, the main question is whether Obama believes his own b.s., and is therefore profoundly stupid, or is in way deep on the self-packaging prevarications. With Obama, I tend to think the latter, but it remains the core issue of his Presidency, which has otherwise been a complete and utter disaster for the poorest 90 percent of the nation, not to mention the rest of the world.
And you might also recall that it was Reagan’s useful idiocy that greased the rails for the tidal wave of heightened class-struggle-from-above under which we’ve been living ever since the Gipper’s rise from the gubernatorial ooze. One effect of that increased level of capitalism has been ordinary people using credit cards to replace the wages and benefits they’ve lost, as our shareholding bail-out takers have gutted the society while building themselves wine cellars and third homes.
What a country!
Tuesday, May 19th, 2009
Let Them Eat Clarity!
Hold shares in a crashed bank, hedge fund, or major corporation? Here’s your bailout check, sir!
Live down the social ladder and hold a credit card you struggle to pay? Will you get some bail-out money? Nope. Maybe a mandated reduction of your interest rate? Nope. A cap at least on your present rate? Nope again. You get this instead:
And this:
Oh, huzzah! Now — oh, glorious day! — it will be slightly easier to know exactly how the bailed-out class is using its publicly-provided do-over to continue raping you. And they will, of course, have to rape you according to some new, very slightly slower timetables. With the Democrats in power now, that much goes without saying, you see.
Why? Well, this is capitalism. Our overclass needs a chance to over-accumulate some more capital, so they can fuel their next “investment” bubble. Will it be in tulips? Stocks? Collateralized debt claims? Survival shelters? That’s for them to say, and for us to bend over and take.
To make a long, sickening story short: You know any new law is a disaster when it passes the Senate, as this great fart-in-your-face did, 90-to-5.
Tuesday, May 12th, 2009
Marketing and Age Compression
As anybody who spends time around kids knows, the problem of “age compression” continues to worsen in this market-totalitarian society.
Age compression is the result of incessant indoctrination toward perceptions, preferences, and self-presentations that big business marketers call “aspirational.”
Boston-based K-8 teacher Geralyn Bywater McLaughlin reports at the excellent Rethinking Schools website:
“I saw you on My Space!”
“Yesterday after school Trina and Shayla got in a catfight over Brandon!”
“My butt is hot!”
“I got his phone number!”
“She thinks she’s cuter than me.”
These comments may or may not raise an eyebrow in any middle school classroom, but the year they became a common occurrence in my kindergarten and 1st-grade classroom threw me for a loop. It was just a few years ago, and at that time I had been teaching for 18 years.
In case you wonder how well-indoctrinated we are to the demands of our bail-out-taking corporate overclass, consider the weakness of McLaughlin’s conclusion from her own experiences:
Children are complex, and pop culture and media are not the sole cause of their troubles.
OK. Cigarettes aren’t the sole cause of lung cancer, either, are they?
The facts, meanwhile, could hardly be starker. Big businesses not only commonly seek to anchor their sales efforts in aspirations, but, by good capitalist logic, they choose the least attainable aspirations as the anchor points.
As I learned in researching my book, The Consumer Trap, the marketers of Pepsi-Cola have conducted long-running marketing/anthropology research projects to discover how best to boost sales by tying their sugary product (which they know kids “shouldn’t drink”) to psycho-social fantasies. One finding from such studies was that “the twenty-three-year-old image” was the best one to shoot for.
This, of course, makes eminent sense, from the perspective of sales imperatives. Being 23 is not only a fleeting moment of maximum health and exuberance, but is also the pinnacle of the kinds of aspirational “looks” on which capitalist modeling is based. Plus, it’s old enough to drink alcohol. Who wouldn’t want to be 23, already or again?
Of course, as anybody who’s spent a moment critically observing adults also knows, corporate capitalist age compression is certainly not confined to kids. If you wonder why the society acts like a late-teen/young-adult who expects mommy and daddy to swoop by and pay off the overdue credit card, go out and take a peek at all the 50-year-olds dressed and coiffed and talking like high-schoolers.
Money is not a viable basis for human culture, after all, it would seem.
Thursday, May 7th, 2009
“The American Dream”: Hidden History, Current Absurdity
Turns out the odious phrase “the American dream” was coined in 1931, during corporate capitalism’s Second Great Depression.
This invasive, oft-injected mental virus is highly adaptive, too, according to the most recent polls of citizens living during this present Third Depression.
Somehow, this Satanic distraction fuses the polar notions that having a chance to become a billionaire and “having a roof over your head and food on the table” are not only one and the same thing, but also acceptable dreams about the highest possible outcomes history’s richest, most powerful empire might possibly produce.
As Barry Glassner suggests to The New York Times, it’s absurd, this deeply corrupted, business-boosted culture of ours.
