Archive for September, 2010
Wednesday, September 15th, 2010
Idiot Wind
Even among greens, wind power is almost universally accepted as a viable solution to Peak Oil. Alas, wind power is greenwash.
Two items:
None of this stops energy capitalists from spreading and exploiting the shit out of the naive assumptions that rule the roost on this crucial topic.
The fact of the matter is that the laws of physics are real, and they dictate that it always costs some energy to get energy. As explained by Kevin Phillips, wind power’s regime had its heyday in the 17th century. It is not capable of powering the 21st, unless we get very radically small.
Tuesday, September 14th, 2010
Deskilling
Despite incessant musing in the business press about youths becoming more jaded, it is virtually certain (though sociologists, utterly prostrate to the grant-makers and tenure police of the world, have certainly not studied the topic) that, as generations pass, big business marketing erodes personal skills.
The latest evidence of this comes from Advertising Age, which reports on the decline :
Measuring interest in various forms of advertising among the affluent for the first time, the survey found heads of household ages 18 to 34 more receptive to advertising than their elders in all but one medium: newspapers.
The 18-to-34 group was 13% more likely to be considerably or somewhat interested in TV ads than older affluents. The younger group was also 9% more likely to be receptive to magazine ads, 28% more likely to be receptive to website ads, 47% more likely to be receptive to cinema ads and as much as twice as likely to be receptive to transit advertising than older affluents.
If this is the trend at the top, do you doubt what’s happening at the bottom?
Thursday, September 9th, 2010
Frontin’ 101
The history of “consumer choice” in America is very substantially the history of front-grouping by corporate capitalists.
Consider these scumbags, who make Big Brother look demure in their claim to be
“GIVING CONSUMERS A VOICE”:
http://www.bottledwatermatters.org/content/home
Wednesday, September 8th, 2010
Real Anti-Smoking Ads
Luis Cayetano lives in Australia and writes this excellent blog and this one also.
Luis noticed the recent TCT post commenting on how purportedly anti-smoking advertising in the United States is a pathetic joke, if not slyly pro-smoking. Luis commented:
Here in Australia the anti-smoking ads are way more serious. They show people with mouth cancer, puss coming out of intestines, and lungs with black ooze seeping out of them. It would be an interesting exercise to do a comparative political-economic analysis of tobacco in the two countries.
Here is some proof, as relayed by Luis:
This ad could never run in the USA. Our commercial media outlets would wail that it is too disturbing and clashes with their programming, which is designed to maintain the fatuous mental state that is most conducive to shopping/capitalist ad watching. Indeed, this ad would never get produced in the USA, as our ad-makers know all this and wouldn’t even try to rock the boat.
Luis and I are hoping to put together something longer and more substantial on this topic, but suffice for now to say that Australia has two things the United States does not: a Labor Party and a serious public broadcasting entity.
Tuesday, September 7th, 2010
Google = BP Mouthpiece
As Herman and Chomsky pointed out, there are structural rules to the way commercial media work. One of the most basic is that commercial media exist to serve their advertisers first.
Hence, it comes as no surprise that Google, the corporate internet search portal/media conglomerate, whored itself out to BP after the Horizon Deepwater oil rig explosion.
According to Advertising Age,
Before BP could stem the oil gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, it unleashed $100 million in ad spending, largely on network TV, to stem the damage to its image. But it also started spending heavily where it had never spent much before: buying ads in Google’s search results.
How much did BP spend on search? In two months, BP went from spending very little on search advertising — about $57,000 a month — to becoming one of Google’s top advertisers, dropping nearly $3.6 million in the month of June alone, according to an internal Google document obtained by Advertising Age. That pushed BP into the upper echelon of search advertisers, in a league with Expedia, which spent at least $5.9 million in June, Amazon, which spent at least $5.8 million, and eBay, which spent at least $4.2 million.
This is a significant outlay, even for BP, which spent $94 million on advertising in 2009, and $78.7 million in the first six months of 2010 alone (excluding search), according to Kantar Media. Search advertisers only pay when their ads convert or get a click, and in June the crisis was still at full-boil, driving clicks on BP’s ads.
Why is there no public, not-for-profit internet service and search provider? After all, the public invented the internet, and the United States has the world’s highest communications bills.
The answer is market totalitarianism, which forbids such questions from being within a mile of “on the table.”
