Archive for December, 2009
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Items from the Ad Age Annual
Advertising Age has just published its annual review of the basic size and scope of the advertising industry in the year 2009. As always, it includes some (though certainly not full) information about the size and scope of big business marketing, the wider managerial discipline of which advertising is but a part.
Some key pieces of information from this December 28, 2009 issue:
→Ad Age labels the economic conditions of the past year or so “the worst recession of your life,” and pronounces that “it is over.” (See cover at left.)
From being sick and watching lots of TV this past week, I can assure you that this “it is over” mantra is now de rigeuer in corporate communications. We shall see whether that’s accurate, or a rather major case of whistling in the graveyard.
→”Ad spending in 2009 suffered its sharpest drop since the Great Depression: -12.9%. This recession also marked the first time since the 1930s that U.S. ad spending declined for two consecutive years.”
For what it’s worth, much of this historic decline reflected what Ad Age calls “a freefall in local advertising” due mostly to the decline of automobile dealership advertising. This speaks to the continuing centrality of the auto-industrial complex within the corporate capitalist order.
→2009 saw “the first decline [in the overall revenue of the Top 100 media corporations] since Ad Age began ranking media firms in 1981.”
This fact is very powerful evidence of the ever-increasing penetration of commercial image-projection within everyday life in the United States. No wonder TV addiction continues to worsen, despite the appalling awfulness, narrowness, and fourth-rate derivateness of the vast majority of commercial-media content. (Spongebob, “Squid on Strike,” being a major exception!)
→Overall, marketing continues to grow faster (and decline later and less) than its advertising sub-component. Ad Age reports that, while ad agency revenues shrank by 9.7 percent in 2009, those of “marketing services” firms fell by only 2.4 percent.
→Jobs in ad agencies are subject to the usual corporate capitalist logic: While ad agency revenues fell by 9.7 percent in 2009, ad agency employment shrank by 14%!
Can you say “Investors first, last, and always!”?
→In 2009, employment in “marketing consulting” and public relations was 202,200, while it was only 161,500 in advertising agencies.
Again, this confirms that marketing tends to grow faster than advertising, which itself tends to grow faster than the overall economy.
→For 2009, Ad Age estimates total U.S. advertising spending by the Top 100 advertisers was $102.6 billion. That is more than two-thirds of total ad spending in the U.S., which Ad Age pegs at just under $150 billion.
Monday, December 28th, 2009
Still Smelling the Sulphur
I’m just emerging from a Christmas Eve flu arrival, but wanted to post this story, sent on by my friend Doug Pressman.
Seems that it takes only 16 cargo ships to emit as much sulphur pollution as the entirety of the world’s billion-plus automotive fleet.
This speaks to the uncounted costs of our overclass’s continuing reliance on low-wage globalization, and also to the inadequacy of regulating isolated segments of the immensely destructive and wasteful corporate capitalist transportation regime.
It is also an important reminder of how comprehensive our problems are in this make-it-or-break-it century.
Wednesday, December 23rd, 2009
Public or Private?: The Source of Invention
I’m off to a holiday lunch, but here’s the start of a new post about the myth of “market” innovation, written by a business-based expert:
Take a look at the powerful inventions that have changed society and ask what role design research played:
- The Airplane
- The Automobile
- The Telephone
- The Radio
- The Television
- The Computer
- The Personal Computer
- The Internet
- SMS Text Messaging
- The Cellphone
What role did design research play? What role did marketing research play? No role.
More on this later, but suffice to say most or all the above items were created by the public sector.
Friday, December 18th, 2009
The System Works
So let’s say an overclass that already owns 90 percent of everything needs to perpetuate a couple of profitable and ideologically useful false-flag wars, and also wants to grant itself the biggest handout in the history of public spending. Let’s also say that the population had clearly gotten tired of the comparatively honest, tough-talking faction in the ruling political cohort. What you would then need, if you wanted to get your way, was a new figurehead capable of re-packaging the overclass agenda by means of “nice guy” prevarications.
The basic idea would be to have the new liar strike poses that looked somehow responsive to popular desires for something other than business-as-usual, but to have the new figurehead actually continue on with the real plan, even as s/he sold the image of “change.”
Q: Would it work? Would the people swallow the schtick, and then remain sufficiently confused to let it all unfold, even as the evidence of continuity piled up?
A: This graphic, from a December 21, 2009 Business Week report on a recent Bloomberg poll of 1,000 U.S. adults:
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
Peckerware
peckerware (n): a useless product designed by one or more cynical peckers for sale to hapless, brainless peckers, with an eye to gathering marketing data on behalf of our pecker-filled overclass
Today’s peckerware news, as reported by The New York Times:
Philip Kaplan earned notoriety and profit a decade ago with a site that chronicled the implosion of the Internet bubble. Now he is back with a project that seems sure to get attention again: Blippy, a soon-to-start online social network that lets you share details of your credit card purchases with friends or strangers.
Mr. Kaplan’s earlier venture, an obscenely named Web site that parodied FastCompany magazine, chronicled the dot-com carnage in 2000 and 2001. Though that site trashed failing start-ups, Mr. Kaplan was an entrepreneur himself: he made money by devising a self-service tool that allowed advertisers to place ads on the site. The tool worked so well that in 2002, he spun it off to create AdBrite, which places ads on more than 100,000 affiliated sites and had 2008 revenue of $31.6 million.
And Kaplan has peckerwoodishness to (sort of) deny that the idea is to collect corporate marketing data:
Q. So you can aggregate spending data?
A. Yeah, there’s a lot of interesting data we’re hoping to provide to users. For instance, you can see people paying different amounts for the same thing: phone bills, cable bills, haircuts, gym memberships.
Q. Won’t marketers be able to see what people are buying and aim ads at your users?
A. Not any differently than they can see what you’re Tweeting or what you’re blogging about. It’s probably more interesting to marketers, but that’s not our focus. Our focus is just in making it a really fun and interesting place for our users.
Yes. Sure. Right.
Wednesday, December 16th, 2009
The TCT Position on Climate Change
Well, the evidence that CO2 levels are rising is inarguable. Nobody disputes that, since it’s easily measured and recorded.
What impact CO2 levels have is somewhat arguable. As this article says, “‘We really don’t know how high CO2 has been in the geologic past. Thus we don’t know how sensitive the surface temperature of the Earth is to CO2,’ said Don DePaolo, head of the Earth Sciences Division at the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory in California. Most global warming predictions are based on fluctuations in CO2 levels and temperature that happened between a relatively recent series of ice ages.”
If you go by what’s known about recent ice ages, the correlation between CO2 levels and surface temperatures is tight. There is some (probably minor) chance that those recent ice ages produce a false correlation, though.
The other issue is whether the rising CO2 levels are partly or wholly human-caused, or merely naturally occurring. To me, it seems highly unlikely that this spike in CO2 just randomly happened to overlap perfectly with the Industrial Revolution and its accelerating burn of CO2-emitting substances.
So, whether you “believe” is really the wrong question. The question is where you place the odds, based on the evidence. Personally, I see it as 90 percent chance that GW is happening, and another 90 percent that it is largely human-made. So .9 times .9 is .81, meaning I think there’s an 81 percent chance that the scary story is accurate.
Of course, the other issue is the attitude to risk one thinks is proper. Unless you think there is strong evidence that global warming is either a complete hoax or is real but holds zero percent chance of causing serious problems for the future, then you have to adopt a responsible position on it, if you wish to practice elementary ethical behavior. To me, the choice is between assuming it’s fake and/or won’t cause big problems, and assuming it might. If it might, then the next question is what to do about it.
Is it not the height of recklessness to refuse to acknowledge a possibly immense risk to one’s (and other people’s) children and grandchildren? Is it not the height of irony that the ones who are doing exactly that are also the ones who claim to stand for “values?”
Meanwhile, the other, possible more pressing environmental catastrophe is peak resources. Personally, I think the odds of encountering huge problems, soon, stemming from that are 95%. Yet, it is entirely suppressed by the media and mainstream politics. Why? My analysis is that it is indeed less debatable, both at the level of evidence and required solutions. And the required solutions include a cessation of capitalism.
