Archive for November, 2010
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010
What They’re Working On
As their host society skitters toward the cliff, what are our late-imperial corporate capitalists placing at the top of their managerial agenda? About what you’d expect, according to Advertising Age, which reports on the prat standing at the right in the picture to your left:
Mr. Burke’s rise has been a quiet but noticeable one. His first job after graduating Harvard Business School was devising product ideas for Grape-Nuts, then owned by General Foods in White Plains, N.Y., not far from his childhood stomping grounds in and around Rye, N.Y.
In a private meeting, Irwin Gotlieb, the global CEO of WPP’s GroupM, Bill Koenigsberg, president-CEO of independent Horizon Media, and Rob Norman, chief executive of GroupM’s North American operations, were among the executives who got their first good look at Chief Operating Officer Stephen Burke, the senior Comcast Corp. executive who at the time was months away from officially being named the incoming leader at the mammoth NBC Universal.
Mr. Burke’s pedigree and management style point to an executive who thrives on intense, albeit quiet, competition. “The stimulus for him is more about the work than all of the other stuff that comes with it,” said William Burke, his youngest brother.
[T]he end goal will be to try and hitch Comcast’s massive cable footprint and the set-top box technology upon which it relies to hours of NBCU content to drive new TV-viewer behavior, such as responding to TV commercials with a remote and pushing the evolution of so-called “addressable” advertising.
These new formats could ultimately make TV advertising more valuable even as TV watching becomes a more diffuse activity. It’s this mix of “pipes, data and content,” said one senior media executive familiar with Mr. Burke, or the ability to devise entertainment as well as the means by which people see it, that might make the $37 billion-plus combination of Comcast and NBCU more compelling to Procter & Gamble or Unilever.
Indeed, Comcast has the opportunity to carve a new media landscape. “Comcast didn’t acquire NBC Universal to move Steve Burke to run the network,” said Group M’s Mr. Gotlieb. Instead, he suggested, Comcast purchased the company “because they saw significant synergies going forward” that include marrying the company’s ability to reach consumer homes with the content that draws consumers to the TV set, computer screen and digital device in the first place.
Such is the stuff of the scions of the executive salary, the absentee dividend, the classic stuffed-shirt pose: “to drive new TV-viewer behavior.”
If you live to know your grandchildren, be sure to tell them this was the way corporate capitalists responded to the gathering trends of the early 21st century.
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010
TCT’s Annual Black Friday Post
A website aptly named Slave Consumer World is as good a source as any for this year’s news on the unceasing expansion of the marketing trick known as “Black Friday”:
Toys-R-Us opens at 10pm on Thanksgiving, Kohl’s at 3am, and Sears and Target at 4am on Friday. Wal-mart (WM) will open at 12:01am Friday with all its Black Friday deals except electronics which go on sale at 5am.
For those readers who avoid the mass media in the United States, “Black Friday” is modern-American “Christian/Christmas”-based talk for “loss leader.”
The phenomenon and its constant creep forward in the calendar speak in many directions about the nature of our market-totalitarian society and culture. Not least of the thoughts that occur to me is this:
“How would you like to be one of the ‘employees’ who have the delightful privilege of going to work at 9:00 p.m. on ‘Thanksgiving’ (i.e., the gustatory launch-event for the yearly Xmas credit-card binge), or, worse, 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. on Loss Leader Day itself?”
If you are one of the chosen few, you might enjoy the lovely holiday tradition of administering CPR to a dying trample victim.
But don’t feel bad if you are not among those lucky enough to be called into work ringing up electronic picture frames in the dead of night: Maybe you can just focus on the pleasures of achieving 99er status during this season’s glorious profit-gushing “jobless recovery.”
Tuesday, November 23rd, 2010
And a Triplet…
If you doubted the accuracy of yesterday’s twin quotes, the second of which suggested that the overclass is enjoying a luxury boom even as the mass of the population sinks toward and through 99er status, consider this item from today’s edition of The New York Times:
The nation’s workers may be struggling, but American companies just had their best quarter ever.
American businesses earned profits at an annual rate of $1.66 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago, at least in nominal or non-inflation-adjusted terms.
Corporate profits have been going gangbusters for a while. Since their cyclical low in the fourth quarter of 2008, profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters, at some of the fastest rates in history.
This breakneck pace can be partly attributed to strong productivity growth — which means companies have been able to make more with less.
Monday, November 22nd, 2010
Twin Quotes for Late 2010
“It’s not just the fact that the elites have all the wealth in a society, but that they are disconnected from the problems. If the rich and powerful still live the good life as society is spinning downhill, they are not motivated to solve the problems.” (Jared Diamond)
Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Ali Dibadj saw in the third quarter a “decoupling” of the luxury and prestige markets, also including LVMH and Elizabeth Arden, from the mass marketers. And the results extended beyond beauty, as Macy’s and Nordstrom showed increases in customer traffic year over year last quarter even as the U.S. Walmart division last week reported continued year-over-year declines in traffic for the quarter ended Oct. 31, albeit improvements from the prior quarter.
“The luxury consumer is shopping again, and we are seeing our strategy contribute to … prestige beauty growing faster than mass in many parts of world,” said Estee Lauder CEO Fabrizio Freda on a conference call with analysts last month. He pointed to U.S. beauty sales in department stores and Sephora growing 4% last quarter, according to NPD Group, while sales in mass channels grew only 1%. (Advertising Age, “Prestige, Luxury Products Thrive as Mass Market Sputters,” November 22, 2010)
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010
Sayonara, Facebook: Phone Number or Picture ID?
“To continue, we need you to provide your phone number. This quick security check helps keep Facebook a community of real people who connect and share using their real identities.”
After many months of uncontroversial usage, this is the message that marketing data-scraper Facebook now places before me, as a requirement of further entry. The “alternative” mode of “verification”? Sending them an image of my government issued photo ID! ROFLMFAO.
This is the end. Facebook is not getting more free marketing data from me.
As the late, great Blackadder once said, “Bye-eee…”
Wednesday, November 17th, 2010
Same as it Ever Was: Post-Carbon Reader Craps Itself
If you’ve been looking at TCT for a while, you may recall my disgust with the Worldwatch Institute’s annual report for 2010. That report, which described itself as “subversive,” was full of flatulent attempts to squeeze something sharp and liberating out of the thought-killing “consumer” vocabulary. As always with such efforts, the noises were all about “culture” (an amorphous, sophomorically handled concept by which the assembled babblers seem to mean “a whole shared way of life, shorn of actual institutions and power formations”), and none about capitalism.
But of course. As James Keye observes, it is extremely hard if not impossible to describe oppressive institutions if one starts by adopting the biased terminology of the oppressors. Slavery becomes a house of mirrors, if one agrees that “slave” (or, worse, “nigger” or other racial slurs) is a proper descriptive category for the human beings held in bondage. Likewise, “consumer” is the capitalist’s reduction of human beings to mere appendages of the profit-making process. Issues of product-usage, product-promotion, and product-selection — and all the ecological issues attaching thereto — are difficult or impossible to describe, if one starts by presuming that commoners are somehow (though we won’t say how) asking for everything that happens, that people really are “consumers” in any but a very narrow and controversial sense.
I mention all this because yet another “green” operation has just tripped and ruinously vomited on this very issue. The Post-Carbon Reader includes a chapter by one William Rees, who blames “human nature” and “consumers” for existing ecocidal trends, and omits all mention of capitalists and capitalism.
As I say in the DbC Hall of Mirrors, where I collect important examples of such damaging thoughtlessness: With friends like these, who needs enemies?
