The Consumer Trap

Archive for August, 2009

Thursday, August 27th, 2009

“Behavioral Guarantees”

According to Advertising Age for August 26, 2009, we’ve entered the age in which media conglomerates are selling air time to corporate advertisers via “behavioral guarantees.”

In the words of marketing research firm TRA, it’s:

Finally true accountability for TV! TRA, a media and marketing research company, has America’s largest second by second national live and time shifted TV database of 1.5 million households and the largest ever single-source database of 370,000 households that matches TV ad viewing to actual purchases of the product being advertised.

Basically, what TRA does is track what individual households watch on TV and what they then buy in stores, with an eye on the households’ exposure to specific ads. TRA then reports its findings to the broadcasters, who promise the corporate sponsors specific sales results from the ads they pay to air. If the promised buying behavior does not materialize, the ad-placing corporation gets a “make-good,” usually more advertising time for free.

And as always, this new market-totalitarian capacity is but the beginning:

‘This is where the future needs to be,’ said Donna Speciale, [media-time broker] MediaVest’s chief investment officer. ‘Our ultimate goal is to figure out how to better reach consumers and get our inventory much more targeted, not just buy the typical demographic breakout. That’s where all the testing in these different areas is heading, to get much more granular research.’

Friday, August 21st, 2009

Write This One Down

Headline, page one, The New York Times, August 21, 2009:

World’s Central Bankers Voice Optimism About Recovery

It’s all over, this Great Depression III, they say. The stock market is somewhat happy and there’s an unfreezing of the short-term securitization markets, they say. You know, those two things are clearly the engines of economic well-being.

Jesus Palomino! This system is toast.

Write this down and remember it a year from now…

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

Quote of the Day

This, from the wonderful and quixotic-in-the-good-way Joe Bageant, strikes me as deeply true, and deeply related to big business marketing, among other things:

Our faculty of ordinary encounter has been systematically broken down. In its place we now have our unique social hallucination. Never do we encounter anything directly, yet we get the illusion of encounter. This includes encounter with each other. Anyone who lives in meatspace with his or her fellow Americans could not deny 57 million of them health. In this society no one is any longer capable of recognizing anyone else. Instead, we see others as the screamers at the town hall meetings, or as communists who want to give free healthcare to illegals and establish death panels. Or as Christian fundamentalists, or as liberals or conservatives. Or as celebrities or as nobodies.

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Remember When?

Remember when the government raised MPG requirements for automobile manufacturing, and the industry complied? It was in the same epoch in which commoners could also deduct their credit card interest from their tax bills.

Heard either idea from Saint Change?

Not quite…far too busy abandoning campaign promises made to voters…

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

Speaking of Clunkers…

Cash for Clunkers is a mega-clunker, as it (very unsurprisingly) turns out.

What kind of MPG leap is the free-money-for-cars gambit yielding? It must be wondrous, right?

Not so much:

Edmunds.com analysts have determined that in May and June, the average fuel efficiency of recently purchased new cars was 21.8 miles per gallon. Since the program launched, the average has jumped to 23.2 mpg, a 6.1 percent improvement.

Wow! Stunning!

And how about the widespread report that the Toyota Corolla is now the #1 seller? Turns out that’s false. The actual bestseller is the Ford Escape SUV, which comes in six sub-models, so gets counted as six different makes, rather than one, in the bogus reports you’re hearing. As Advertising Age explains:

Interestingly, the government’s list of top-10 vehicles sold showed that consumers bought mostly compact cars during the promotion, with the Toyota Corolla in the No. 1 slot. The discrepancy arises because Uncle Sam considers each of the six versions of the Escape (as well as different versions of the trucks) to be a separate model, while Edmunds tallied all Escape-model sales.

The actual top ten models people are choosing with their “Clunkers” trade-ins, according to edmunds.com?

1. Ford Escape — an SUV

2. Ford Focus

3. Jeep Patriot — an SUV

4. Dodge Caliber — an SUV

5. Ford F-150 — a pick-up truck

6. Honda Civic

7. Chevrolet Silverado 1500 — a pick-up truck

8. Chevrolet Cobalt

9. Toyota Corolla

10. Ford Fusion

So, five of the top seven are SUVs or pick-ups.

“Only in America,” as they say…

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

We’re #1!

Hey, kids! Guess what nation-state is home to the world’s highest cellular phone bills — by far the highest?

Hint: It’s corporate capitalism’s strongest stronghold, the land where brainwashed drones attend meetings to yell at people about the glories of the world’s most expensive and defective and profitable medical insurance scheme, rather than about the craven, bait-and-switch perpetuation of that scheme…

On Friday, the OECD will publish a report detailing the reality that, comparing similar packages and uses across borders, the USA is almost 5 times more expensive than Finland, and a full 25% more expensive than runner-up Spain. I will obtain the new report Friday and report on the details. Those are virtually certain to show that the American way of deregulation and private ownership equals naked theft in yet another boilerplate modern industry…

Until then, here’s a teaser.