The Consumer Trap

Archive for October, 2009

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

Some Good News

Turns out people aren’t as gullible as I recently reported.

This just in from Advertising Age:

CORRECTION: Both the original headline and the body of this story about Honda’s “Social Experiment” incorrectly stated that the automaker tallied 2 million fans on Facebook. Honda now has more than 250,000 fans (the one-day takeover Oct. 19 more than doubled the number of 63,083 and since then has grown.) The 2 million figure represented how many “connections” — or how many friends its fans collectively have — a very soft metric of social-media success. We were way off and we apologize for the errors.

Me, too.

Thursday, October 29th, 2009

The “Social Network” Trap

Facebook (allied to Microsoft) and Myspace (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp) are fake-outs on unsuspecting users, mostly children, teens, and young adults.  The raison d’etre of these two “consumer” traps is to gather marketing data and shove advertising even farther into users’ lives.  This website has long reported on this fact, and will continue to do so, as these cynically planned, BBM-sponsored, wildly popular, narcissism-promoting social control operations expand.

Here was Bob Garfield, who, in the December 1, 2008 issue of Advertising Age, observed this little tidbit for his audience of corporate planners:

500 million social-network users, each generating 1,200 page views per month, represent 600 billion monthly opportunities for an ad impression. [emphasis added]

Monday, October 26th, 2009

Honda “Experiment” Tests Shallowness, Vanity

Honda Motor Company is running a marketing campaign packaged as a “social experiment.” The cover story is to see how much people “love” Honda automobiles by inviting them to post personal photos and blurbs on the Facebook “social” networking site.

The truth, of course, is that what Honda is really testing is how effectively they can convert people’s petty vanity and sheer programmability into still more irrational brand loyalty.

Have people been falling into this trap?

The results thus far have blown away Mr. Peyton, who felt at the campaign’s onset that “If we got a million connections, that would be cool.” He called the push “a pretty powerful piece of advertising because people are buying into it and we aren’t giving anything away.”

Honda initially supported the site with a sprinkling of ads on Facebook. “It wasn’t a big media buy, but it got a lot of attention,” said Tom Peyton, senior manager-national advertising. Earlier this month, TV was added to the mix, with 15- and 30-second spots featuring actual owners. The commercials were created by Honda’s longtime agency, independent RPA, Santa Monica, which developed the concept. The buy, also handled by RPA, encompasses prime-time programming such as “30 Rock,” “How I Met Your Mother,” “Dancing With the Stars” and NFL football.

The campaign got a huge boost after a one-day targeted homepage takeover Oct. 19 on high-reach sites, including ESPN.com, CNN.com and SportsYahoo.com. That more than doubled the number of Facebook fans into the range of 1.7 million. (As of press time Oct. 22, the number had topped 2 million).

Footnote: As of this morning, the number of victims of this campaign is approaching 2.5 million.

Friday, October 23rd, 2009

Marketing History Memento

Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

21st-Century Corporate Food Research

In a world where hunger plagues a billion people and child under-nutrition kills 5 million infants and toddlers every year, what kind of breakthroughs are the corporate capitalists working on?

This kind:

LONDON (AdAge.com) — Kellogg Co. is introducing new technology in the U.K. that allows it to burn its famous signature onto individual cereal flakes by using lasers.

The technology, which was developed in Britain, is being used in a trial to stamp out imitation cereals — which Kellogg calls “fake flakes” — by branding Corn Flakes with the company logo.

Helen Lyons, lead food technologist at Kellogg, said in a statement, “There has been an increase in the number of [private labels] trying to capitalize on the popularity of Kellogg’s corn flakes. We want shoppers to be under absolutely no illusion that Kellogg’s does not make cereal for anyone else. We’re constantly looking at new ways to reaffirm this, and giving our golden flakes of corn an official stamp of approval could be the answer.”

Ms. Lyons added, “We’ve established that it is possible to apply a logo or image onto food, now we need to see if there is a way of repeating it on large quantities of our cereal. We’re looking into it.”

Appetizing system, ain’t it?

Saturday, October 10th, 2009

Nobel Committee Shits Itself Again

=))     :-&

Now that the laughter and projectile vomiting have subsided: what he said.

Dr. King is spinning in his grave…

Dr. Kissinger is smiling…