Archive for March, 2010
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
F-R-A-U-D
Mandated offers of coverage, but no cap on the price of the policies offered, in other words. So, actually, in practice, no insurance for sick or previously sick children until at least 2014. “Good news! We hereby offer you a policy for Tiny Tim! Your monthly premium will be $2,789 a month, with 20% co-pays for in-network services,up to a maximum of $25,000 a year.”
Meanwhile, can you recognize the pattern here?:
NAFTA
WTO/Conclusion of Uruguay Round
AFDC —> TANF
Glass-Steagall repeal
Expiration of Independent Counsel statute
Romney-Ca…oops, Obama-Care
P.S. In case you’ve forgotten, during his award winning, massively fraudulent electoral campaign, Barack Obama promised his version of “health care” (largely an oxymoron in a capitalist medical system) reform would not include a personal mandate requiring all U.S. residents to purchase private medical insurance. As CBS News reported, this promise was presented by Obama as “the biggest difference between” himself and Hillary Clinton on the topic.
We now know that the only difference between Clinton and Obama is that the former was substantially more honest with the public about her actual plans for governance. Now, there’s a depressing thought…
Thursday, March 25th, 2010
More From Black Reagan
Did you operate an illegal war against Nicaragua? “Gosh, I can’t recall…But trees cause more pollution than automobiles do, ketchup is a vegetable, and the rich aren’t rich enough.”
Flash forward 22 years:
“What about the public option?” a man called out, interrupting the president in an exchange that seemed momentarily to throw Mr. Obama off stride by forcing him to depart from the remarks he was reading off a TelePrompTer.
“That’s not in it!” Mr. Obama called back.
“Why not?” the man replied.
“Because we couldn’t get it through Congress, that’s why,” Mr. Obama said.
Wednesday, March 24th, 2010
The Whole Internet is Now Marketing Spyware
In The Consumer Trap book, I predicted that the whole internet would eventually become a tool of covert big business marketing research.
Told you so:
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Marketers are pushing the boundaries on data collection, but how far will regulators and the public let it go?
The latest frontier for marketers is taking offline data such as income, credit rating, home value, savings, past purchases, number of children living at home and other data, and merging that with the blooming online data stream.
The offline data — including extremely sensitive, personally identifiable information — has been used by the direct-marketing industry for decades. But only recently have marketers begun to connect that trove to online behavior. The resulting picture is revolutionary for marketers.
From The Wall Street Journal for March 15, 2010:
Digital-marketing companies are rapidly moving to blend information about consumers’ Web-surfing behavior with reams of other personal data available offline, seeking to make it easier for online advertisers to reach their target audiences.
EXelate Media, a start-up that collects and sells Web data on consumers, is set to announce an alliance Monday with Nielsen, the big consumer-research firm. The two firms say that under the deal, eXelate will tie its data on more than 150 million Internet users to Nielsen’s database, which includes information on 115 million American households, to provide more-detailed profiles of consumers.
“We can build [consumer] profiles from any building blocks,” says Meir Zohar, chief executive of eXelate, which was founded in 2007 and has offices in New York and Israel. “Age, gender, purchase intent, interests, parents, bargain shoppers—you can assemble anything.”
EXelate gathers online consumer data through deals with hundreds of Web sites. The firm determines a consumer’s age, sex, ethnicity, marital status and profession by scouring Web-site registration data. It pinpoints, for example, which consumers are in the market to buy a car or are fitness buffs, based on their Internet searches and the sites they frequent. It gathers and stores the information using tracking cookies, or small strings of data that are placed on the hard drive of a consumer’s computer when that consumer visits a participating site.
Advertisers, in turn, purchase the cookie data from eXelate and use it to buy targeted online ads.
The new deal will allow advertisers to go to eXelate to buy New York-based Nielsen’s trove of data converted to a cookie-based digital format. That data comes from sources including the Census Bureau, the firm’s own research and that of other consumer-research firms, such as Mediamark Research and Experian Simmons.
By the way, when I wrote The Consumer Trap in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the biggest existing marketing database was Mastercard’s pool of spying on 70 million households. Now, Nielsen’s database includes 115 million households.
How many households does the U.S. Census Bureau believe there are in the United States at present? 114,825,428.
So, every household in the country is now being tracked, in detail, by our corporate capitalist overclass.
Meanwhile, the parts of off-the-job life, still sometimes quaintly called “free time,” that aren’t devoted to taking in corporate capitalist sales communications and/or shopping are increasingly serving as marketing research vehicles.
Two words: Market totalitarianism.
Not that it much matters, given the difficulty of escaping the system altogether, but if you are inclined to resist, here is the link to opt out of eXelate. It’s probably worth the gesture, if only to flip the bird to the powers that be.
Thursday, March 18th, 2010
What’s the Serbo-Croatian Word for “Fraud”?
Hint: It starts with a “K.”
Under the leadership of the 2008 Marketer of the Year, the Democratic Party has returned to the Clintonian task of deepening the medical insurance crisis in the United States. At present, the atrocity known as the Republican Party stands to the left of the Democrats on the issue. The Republicans favor doing nothing to combat the nation’s heavy reliance on over-priced, under-performing, waste-promoting “private medical insurance.” The Democrats? They want to make purchasing that defective product legally mandatory, and to use existing Medicare spending to help finance their attempted bailout of a yet another hopelessly broken, death-dealing capitalist industry.
Meanwhile, for those of you still laboring under the delusion that anything inside the Democratic Party is decent, consider the latest courageous action of Democrat Dennis Kucinich:
Dennis Kucinich, who had been one of the few voices of opposition to the faulty healthcare “reform,” announced today that he intend to vote “Yes” on the healthcare bill currently under consideration in the US House of Representatives. The announcement came after a high-pressure visit from President Barack Obama to the Cleveland district Kucinich represents.
Kucinich [had previously] railed against the House bill, claiming that it “…would put the government in the role of accelerating the privatization of health care.” This critique was backed up by a “No” vote in November 2009. In House deliberations, however, Kucinich had already moved off his single-payer position, first searching for a “robust” public option and then attempting to create a clause that would allow states to pursue single-payer programs. Today Kucinich went a step further, cowering to the will of a White House bankrolled by big pharma and the private health insurance lobby.
Kucinich called it “a detour” and claimed that all of his previous criticisms of the bill still stood. The healthcare bill had become, he proposed, a contest between the presidency and its far-right critics. More correctly, Kucinich caved to pressure from pro-Obama groups, such as Moveon.org who recently collected more than $1 million to pressure House Democrats who had voted no on the original bill. The extent of the pressure campaign was brought home when Obama appeared in Kucinich’s voting district this week and summoned him to a meeting on Airforce One. There, the terms of Kucinich’s sell-out were determined.
The one powerful voice that has been remarkably absent from the whole spectacular public discussion of healthcare reform is that of the private health insurance lobby. Why so quiet? Because they wrote significant portions of the bill currently under consideration in the House. Because they have purchased the support of Demcoratic and Republican representatives by spending an average of $609,000 a day on lobbying during the first six months of 2009. And, because Obama’s healthcare proposal will open up new opportunities to harvest taxpayer money by providing clunker healthcare plans to the uninsured. Kucinich knows this yet he will still provide his name to this damaging scheme.
Most of all, Kucinich’s betrayal points to the burning need for political activity, both electoral and social movement based, independent of the Democrats and Republicans.
If only the Democratic Party were merely a detour. Instead, they are just another off-ramp to the market-totalitarian wastelands, albeit one with mislabeled signs.
Tuesday, March 16th, 2010
Keep an Eye on New Jersey
It’s actually far from funny. But, after three decades of selling the more deluded crackers the notion that big government is the primary source of economic hardship and social discombobulation, there are now enough deep believers to not just elect peddlers of this laughable dogma, but a few major office-holders who are actually going to try it all out.
One such is the perfectly-named Chris Christie, the doughy, mafia capo look-alike who was recently elected by the benighted part of the New Jersey electorate to be that state’s Governor.
According to today’s New York Times, Christie didn’t get the memo that actually cutting government is not something a good government-basher actually does upon reaching power:
“Today, we are fulfilling the promise of a smaller government that lives within its means,” Governor Christie said in remarks prepared for delivery at 1 p.m. “The defenders of the status quo have already begun to yell and scream. They will try to demonize me. They will seek to divide us rather than unite us. But even they know in their hearts, if not yet in their minds — it is time for a change.”
The plan?
Over all, [Christie's] budget would shrink state spending by 9 percent from the fiscal year that ends in June, to $28.3 billion.
Upending the priorities of his Democratic predecessors, Governor Christie unveiled a budget that would hit the poor, elderly, schoolchildren, college students and inner-city residents hardest, while largely sparing the wealthy and businesses.
It remains to be seen whether Christie can get this through the New Jersey legislature, given that most office holders, including those who peddle anti-government cant, secretly know that cutting government spending in the middle of a depression is a recipe for disaster.
But, if Christie gets his way, look for New Jersey to implode even faster than the rest of this deluded and dying empire.
Monday, March 15th, 2010
Shopper Marketing Marches On
Big business marketing never rests, never stops, always grows.
The latest Advertising Age reports on the ongoing expansion and refinement of what’s called “shopper marketing,” the effort to study, analyze, and reshape people’s in-store behaviors.
Currently an $18-billion-a-year branch of corporate marketing in the United States, “shopper marketing” is growing by more than 20 percent a year, Ad Age reports.
Since it’s one of the newest of marketing’s tentacles, it is still far from maturity:
The problem, according to Jon Kramer, CMO at Alliance Sales & Marketing, is that retailers and manufacturers don’t exactly have shopper marketing down to a science yet. “It’s the wild, wild West right now in terms of how you define shopper insights and how you turn those into action,” he said.
Andy Murray, worldwide CEO, Saatchi X, said that now is the time for retailers and manufacturers to be testing and learning. They won’t be done, he said, until they can mirror experiences like those on Amazon, which suggests complimentary purchases for every item put in the shopping cart.
Orwell’s Big Brother would be jealous of some of the new “shopper marketing” techniques.
Take a look at this video clip of the work done by the “ShopperGauge” spy camera:
click image to go to ShopperGauge website
Ever think those springloaded gizmos that push supermarket and drug store items to the front of the shelf are there just to keep the shelves “fronted”? If so, you were wrong: “Product takeaway from the shelf or display is recorded by digital ‘pushers.’”
Meanwhile:
Cameras could be monitoring the time it takes to you browse the aisle and put that box of Mac ‘N Cheese in your cart. The purchase itself might have been driven by one of Kraft’s “mom cues” designed to tug your heartstrings in the store. Or your motivation may have been an idea from its iFood Assistant that you downloaded in the store. Researchers might later examine your purchase data and household information and pair it with economic models to determine that the store is only getting 10% of your package-dinner dollar — and look for ways to build that up.
And, of course, what exists is never good enough:
Much of the work being done to measure a consumer’s mood or emotional state has been focused on the shelf, based upon the shopper-marketing old mantra that some 70% of purchase decisions are made in store. But Mr. Hoyt argues that shopper marketing must start in the home, with digital entreaties that reach consumers while they’re making out shopping lists. It’s insulation for marketers from “the wavering hand,” as consumers eye lower-priced or sexier merchandise. But, he said, it has to continue all the way to the point of purchase.
