Archive for November, 2009
Monday, November 30th, 2009
From 1984 to 2010: The Emergence of “Household-Level Addressability”
Regardless of the state of the wider human and ecological world, corporate capitalism pushes market totalitarianism ever farther up the asymptote.
Advertising Age is reporting that addressable television advertising, long coveted by corporate marketers, has reached the point of being “an emerging concept.” 2010, Ad Age says, is the year when TV addressability will move from small test runs to full implementation into the broadcast streams for millions of U.S. households. “Next year is when you’ll start to see how addressability gets sucked into a more core marketing strategy,” said Visible World President Tara Walpert Levy to the long-running marketing journal.
So what is “addressable TV advertising” and why does it matter? Ad Age explains the technique:
Two types of addressable technologies are available: zone addressability and household. Zone refers to a group of ZIP codes or neighborhoods that can often be bundled demographically, so a marketer can target a predominantly upper-income neighborhood or a predominantly Spanish-speaking area. Household addressability can target TV viewers based on specific data ranging from age to sex to current ownership of consumer goods.
In other words, big business marketers are about to gain the ability to send customized advertisements to specific geographic and demographic targets, down to the level of the individual household.
Thanks to cable television’s progressive replacement of old-fashioned ether-based broadcasting, corporate marketers have long been able to collect detailed viewing-behavior data from individual households. Now, their customers (big business advertisers) will also be able to tailor the marketing communications going back into those households according to what they’ve learned from their prior analysis of not just viewing, but also shopping, demographic, psychographic, and financial data. Corporate capacities for creating and measuring the effects of behavioral stimuli are poised, once again, to expand.
Will it actually work? Will ad-addressability bring our already comprehensively commodified, commercialized, and deskilled personal lives into still tighter compliance with the dictates of the bottom line of the world’s private-jetting overclass?
Ad Age again:
Ad Age, Visible World and Cablevision’s poll found over 59% of respondents considered addressable advertising to be at least 50% more effective than a non-targeted campaign.
Cablevision’s Optimum Cable recently advertised its triple-play subscription packages in New York with household addressable ads that targeted customers based on current subscriptions. Households that subscribed only to wireless and phone packages received ads offering a package that included cable, while cable-only households were offered a package that included phone and high-speed data services. David Kline, president-Rainbow Advertising Sales Corp., said the company saw a double-digit lift in subscriptions among the targeted households. In zone addressability, Cablevison’s recently launched Optimum Select allows viewers to interact with an ad to request information or request a product sample, “We’ve seen really phenomenal response from consumers in our first month,” Mr. Kline said. “We often run out of product.”
Though capitalism remains comparatively subtle and anarchic, the arrival of “household-level addressability” constitutes a real step beyond the telescreens of Orwell’s Big Brother. Those could only look in on you. Nobody in Oceania sat in front of their telescreen for fun. Certainly, nobody was addicted to sitting in front of them. People didn’t stand around the water cooler talking about what they saw on the telescreen last night. Oceanians didn’t purchase giant, energy-sucking, room-dominating plasma telescreens and hook them up to telescreen recorders.
We “Americans,” the supposedly privileged residents of the allegedly history-ending, best-of-all-possible-worlds, do. Meanwhile, our Earth-wrecking masters are laughing all the way to the bailed-out bank.
Saturday, November 28th, 2009
Here Come…the Station Wagons!
For all the sponsored chatter about hybrids and alternative fuels, the fact remains that smaller cars mean smaller profits.
Hence, if you pay attention to what the overclass transportation dictators are actually putting out, you find them working hardest to recapture as much of the profitability of the embattled behemoth/SUV size bonanza as they can.
One sign of this effort is the return of the station wagon, as reported in today’s edition of The New York Times.
Here are the lovely stats on this facet of “change you can believe in”:
click image for larger view
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Skeptical, But Not of Capitalism
The Amazing Randi, scourge of small-time quacks and hoaxers, is now pimping for corporate usurer Capital One, recipient of $3.6 billion in TARP money, long-time practitioner of bait-and-switch promotion, junk mail, and saturation “brand loyalty” advertising.
I guess being big and rich enough gets you a pass at the JREF.
Wednesday, November 25th, 2009
Cars in China
Having long since reached saturation in their main citadel of car-pushing, what do the corporate capitalists have in store for transportation arrangements in China?
According to Yang Jian, Managing Editor of Automotive News China, present trends suggest that China will have somewhere between 200 and 300 million cars in operation by 2030.
If electric cars become cheap enough, it could be far worse:
Their influence could be profound.
Electric cars, for example, are prohibitively expensive today. Yet given advances, they could become affordable to the mass of consumers tomorrow.
If that were to happen, the many millions of people riding electric bicycles could switch to electric cars. That would boost vehicle ownership to a level that is now unimaginable.
Something to think about the next time you’re tempted to swallow the notion that inexpensive electric cars are a good thing for anybody but corporate investors.
Tuesday, November 24th, 2009
The New Party Line on Cars
Keith Crain is the publisher and editor of Automotive News. In his latest editorial, he enunciates the new capitalist party line about the pivotal issue of transportation choice.
Crain begins with what appears to be some refreshing honesty:
For starters, there is the energy crisis. In truth, there has been an energy crisis since the early 1970s, only someone finally noticed. In the United States, those who could have helped end the crisis with an intelligent energy policy stuck their heads in the sand and hoped the thing would blow over. It didn’t.
Crain, of course, neglects to mention that nobody has shoved heads down into siliconic powder harder than capitalists in general and automotive capitalists in particular.
According to Crain, all that has now ended:
When Congress finally discovered the problem, it swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. So today the world is scrambling for new ideas and products that will help reduce the use of gasoline and open up opportunities for other forms of transportation.
Everyone knows about the Toyota Prius, now in its third iteration. It was the first successful gasoline-electric hybrid. It owns that market. But there are lots of hybrids on the market, and there will be plenty more.
This is where the crucial trick of the new orthodoxy occurs: After quickly mentioning “opportunities for other forms of transportation,” Crain returns to the business class’s century-old claim that micro-choices between car models is all anybody could ever want or need:
General Motors Co.’s long-heralded Chevy Volt will be introduced to the public next year. It is an electrically driven car with a gasoline engine that generates electricity for the car’s drive motor, not unlike the Electro-Motive trains GM manufactured for decades.
Plenty of new companies are popping up. Fisker will start production of a luxury plug-in hybrid in Finland next year. The car has enough design appeal that it turns heads wherever it is tested. Fisker has received a half-billion dollars in federal funds, most of which will be used for development of a second plug-in hybrid that will be built in the United States.
More minicars are on the way. The Smart, developed by Mercedes, will be joined by the Fiat 500 in the United States. And you can rest assured that the Asians will be right behind with similar vehicles.
We’re bound to see some electric vehicles and hybrids that use diesel engines for even better fuel economy. And it won’t be long before we see two- and three-cylinder engines being used for vehicles and charging systems.
It’s an exciting time for the engineers who are developing all sorts of new engines and vehicles.
It will be even more exciting for consumers. They have never had so many choices.
What Crain neglects to mention here is the extreme danger of his own intended purpose, which is to restrict public discussion of our continuing lack of serious transportation macro-choices. Sure, if you can spend $40,000, you might soon be able to choose a Chevy Volt. But, especially in most American cities, when will walking, cycling, and rails gain anything like equal infrastructural footing with automotive support systems?
They won’t, barring a social movement to reform the society. That’s because the world’s corporate overlords are deeply and systematically hostile to anything that would spoil their ability to continue selling automobiles at something like present volumes. So, particularly here in the world’s largest car market, nothing could be farther off the official agenda than providing “opportunities for other forms of transportation” to genuinely compete with cars-first transportation arrangements.
If we hope to save ourselves from impending ecotastrophe, we must resist the heavily sponsored, increasingly strident tricks of the car peddlers. Towns and cities built to favor walking and bicycling over energy-wasting machines are the only possible basis for a sustainable, progressive global civilization. Cars, due to their extreme inherent energy demands, can only be a minor part of the human future. Anybody who suggests otherwise is an enemy of your children.
Monday, November 23rd, 2009
What Kunstler Said!
James Howard Kunstler remarks today on the continuing reign of the word “consumer” within our market-totalitarian communications environment:
And, incidentally, what exactly is a “consumer?” And why, at the highest levels of journalism in this land, do we refer to citizens that way? As if the American people have no other purpose except to buy things? Or is that the only way an “economist” can imagine them?
Someday, if we survive the coming capitalist ecocide, people will look back and be amazed at how blind and thoroughly dominated we have been — right up to its end, apparently — in this investors-first epoch.
Meanwhile, it might help raise our odds of passing along this possibility for amazement if at least we, the supposed progressives and radicals, would stop parroting our overlords’ rank biases.
