Archive for November, 2010
Monday, November 15th, 2010
James Keye Rings the Bell
For anybody who’s been trying to follow my long-running attempt to get people, and especially those on the left, to stop using the biased and biasing “consumer” vocabulary, James Keye has just explained the point with greater clarity and generality than I’ve been able to muster:
Likewise, one cannot rationally discuss the corporate capitalist marketing juggernaut using only the word “consumer” for those on its receiving end; the word assumes a subservient position, and thereby goes far toward desensitizing its users to the very processes and conflicts and human relationships they seek to explain and redress.
Monday, November 15th, 2010
Kinect: Trojan Horse for Marketing
The Wall Street Journal has revealed that Microsoft’s new Kinect video game extender is a means for increasing the spying capacities of corporate marketers:
Dennis Durkin, who serves as chief operating officer and chief financial officer for Microsoft’s Xbox video game business, told investors Thursday that Kinect – which allows users to play video games without so much as a joystick – presents business opportunities for targeted game marketing and advertising.
Kinect is a camera peripheral that plugs into the Xbox 360 console and allows players to control games with only body movements. The system uses facial recognition technology to sign in players and match them with their avatars and profiles.
But the technology can also be put to use beyond those purposes, Durkin said in a presentation at an investors conference sponsored by BMO Capital Markets.
“We can cater which content we present to you based on who you are,” Durkin said. “How many people are in the room when an ad is shown? How many people are in the room when a game is being played? When you add this sort of device to a living room, there’s a bunch of business opportunities that come with that.”
Such a system also could raise questions about privacy. In the past few months, targeted online advertising has been facing increasing scrutiny, and the use of cameras and facial recognition would push such technology into a new realm.
And dig this attempt at spin Microsoft sent to the WSJ after it broke this important story:
UPDATE: Microsoft emailed the following statement about its current policies regarding privacy and Xbox: “Xbox 360 and Xbox LIVE do not use any information captured by Kinect for advertising targeting purposes. Microsoft has a strong track record of implementing some of the best privacy protection measures in the industry. We place great importance on the privacy of our customers’ information and the safety of their experiences.”
Does Microsoft say it is not and will never be selling such invaluable, long-dreamed-of marketing data to any parties? No. In fact, it doesn’t even say Microsoft isn’t now collecting and using them. It merely says “Xbox 360″ (whatever that is beyond a name for a machine) and “Xbox Live” “do not.”
The rest, of course, is the usual laughfest of jive-talk and improper comparison: “some of the best privacy protection measures in the industry.” ROFLMFAO.
Saturday, November 13th, 2010
They’re Vilifying Tobacco Entrepeneurs!
You see? You see what government does (unless you purchase it)?
It VILIFIES tobacco corporations! From today’s NYT:
But Philip Morris International, the separate company spun out of Altria in 2008 to expand the company’s presence in foreign markets, has been especially aggressive in fighting new restrictions overseas.
It has not only sued Uruguay, but also Brazil, arguing that images the government wants to put on cigarette packages do not accurately depict the health effects of smoking and “vilify” tobacco companies. The pictures depict more grotesque health effects than the smaller labels recommended in the United States, including one showing a fetus with the warning that smoking can cause spontaneous abortion.
What next? Calling fire inflammatory?
Roger Quarles, that fine upstanding Kentucky entrepreneur and leader, however, is onto this sinister plot:
Horrors!
Meanwhile, for those keeping score, one might note here yet another example of the namby-pamby jokes that pass for “anti-tobacco” campaigns back in the US of A.
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010
The Dead and the Dying
*pauper & bauble*
Not surprising, but telling: The “British Royal Family” have taken to marketing their mega-pampered zombie selves via marketing data-scraper Facebook.
Shows what amazing stuff plugs straight into this decrepit culture. The corporate capitalist overclass can’t bring itself to tolerate 10 seconds of serious discussion of any one of the smorgasbord of dire crises facing it (and us), but these paleo-Yahoos and their running IQ test (if you “like” them, you fail) are welcome news, a dear old friend of the culture of sponsored stupidity.
It’s what they call marketing synergy, one hand washing the other. A pack of undead figurehead feudal claimants both lending and drawing aid and comfort to and from the heedless, clueless Davosian hackocracy now busily driving the world over the last cliff in history, with “royals” on their “friends” page.
Monday, November 8th, 2010
World’s Easiest “Critical Question”
Researchers at Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity have just issued a report finding that — surprise, surprise — big business marketing to children continues to expand in all directions.
The report itself is moderately interesting and useful, even for us grizzled TCT vets who know that the expansion of marketing is built into our political-economic order. Example: Under the ever-growing tide of sales-messaging they see, 15% of pre-schoolers now ask every day to be taken to McDonalds.
Of course, especially coming from an Ivy institution, the researchers also adopt the obligatory limp-leg routine that has always marked Naderian special pleading against corporate capitalism’s relentless life-endangering output. Imagining that somebody in the overclass will soften up and take their plea for concern to heart, they studiously avoid making sharp institutional diagnoses, so as not to offend their intended audience. (C. Wright Mills called this ingrained obsequiousness “liberal practicality.”)
Playing dumb and pretending that, despite the mountain of screaming evidence, it’s all just a big mistake is also part of this schtick. Consider this remarkable bubble-headed passage:
The restaurant industry response: The two largest fast food advertisers to children, McDonald’s and Burger King, have joined the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI) pledging to advertise only “better-for-you” choices to children, and the majority of restaurants have introduced some more nutritious options to their menus.
But critical questions remain: Are these actions having a positive impact? Or, does the sheer volume of marketing for restaurants’ least nutritious options eclipse any positive efforts?
Let’s see now: Either the fast feeders are legitimately trying to promote healthy food, or they are making gestures that they and every non-brain-dead critic know full well to be mere “halo-ware” strategies.
At Yale, they can’t make this call? Draw your own conclusions…
Thursday, November 4th, 2010
Testing the Market Totalitarianism Thesis
Market totalitarianism is the creeping advancement of corporate capitalist control over all the details of modern life, in and across its three major spheres — work, politics, and personal life.
If you doubt this phenomenon is real, consider this fact, as mentioned, all the way from Australia, by TCT commenter Luis Cayetano: In May of 1958, Erich Fromm was interviewed at length on commercial television in the United States.
52 years later, that same thing is so far from being possible, it is almost unimaginable. Picture 60 Minutes, for example, devoting not just one but two segments (see the run-time of the Wallace interview of Fromm) to letting, say, Noam Chomsky explain his present view of the society and the world.
No fucking way that happens now, obviously. Sponsors these days, having grown all the more powerful and having learned well the dangers of unpoliced television, would never permit it, and the producers and reporters, knowing that, would never in a million years propose it.
