Archive for December, 2010
Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
Tune In, Drop Out
Those wily “consumers.” Despite overclass needs, ordinary people strongly and clearly oppose “behavioral targeting,” i.e. use of the internet for spying by big business marketers. Even when the question is loaded in favor of the overclass by inclusion of language about corporate marketing making websites free, 61 percent still say “no” to the practice.
Of course, from the overclass perspective, behavioral targeting is exactly and precisely the main reason the internet exists. Real-time tracking of individuals’ reactions, preferences, and behaviors has always been a core goal of the ever-expanding practice of marketing research.
Hence, popular preferences are simply unacceptable:
Marketers defending behavioral targeting have argued in part that the public might not understand how much this advertising fuels free websites. “Because there’s been so much scare-mongering, people have been frightened about behavioral advertising,” said John Montgomery, chief operating officer of GroupM Interaction, a unit of WPP. “People are now equating it to something more pernicious.”
Consumers need to realize that the growth and innovation in online advertising, which increasingly relies on behavioral targeting, underpins the free web that consumers want, Mr. Montgomery said [to Advertising Age magazine].
This shit ain’t stopping, in other words.
Meanwhile, if you are so inclined, take a look at this little band-aid, the marketing trade’s attempt at “self-policing.” It allows you to “opt out” of being behaviorally targeted by the handful of voluntary participants. In the process, it also reveals how laughable self-policing always is. My run of the tool showed that only 10 of the 59 firms that admit to using Firefox as a behavioral tracker allow me a successful opt-out through this avenue.
Monday, December 20th, 2010
Interactive Cake
When it comes to allocating society’s surplus wealth, capitalists, the reigning story goes, always know best.
So, one might ask: Beyond perpetuating existing core institutions like big business marketing and cars-first transportation, what new wonders does our corporate overclass hope to deliver, in this, the epoch of peaking resources, crumbling ecosystems, and unresolved extreme inequality and fractiousness?
Interactive Disney cakes.
Renews one’s appreciation for supposedly “crude” predictions that “at a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, …with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters.”
Thursday, December 16th, 2010
“Consumer” History
Google has been digitizing books by the million.
One result is a new tool allowing us to see how often words or phrases have appeared in books across the decades.
Naturally, your humble TCT editor ran the corporate capitalist slave-word “consumer” through the machine.
The results (click the image for a large, readable view):
Observations? A few that strike my eye:
1. Not surprisingly, the high water mark for use of “consumer” rather precisely overlapped the self-confident, more functional-looking phase of post-democratic market totalitarianism in the USA, i.e. the years from 1980 through 2000.
2. “Consumer” is now used roughly 3 times more often than it was in the 1920s.
3. “Consumer” made major upward leaps in both the 1930s and the late 1960s. This speaks volumes about the confusion and failure of the American left, which contributed to the tragedy via Pyrrhic gestures like Consumers Union and dead-ends like Herbert Marcuse and his progeny of tail-chasing “consumer culture” and “consumer society” theorists.
4. Most recently, “consumer” has experienced its first drop since it entered the public lexicon. A hopeful sign? Are some people starting to sense the slander and smell the rat?
5. Note the spike that happened shortly after “consumer” received its first use outside capitalism’s doctrinal priesthood, a.k.a. professional economics. This happened, as I’ve said before, in 1898, in none other than that year’s Sears and Roebuck Catalog. Is this more evidence for the TCT claim that “consumer” is nothing more than a biased capitalist neologism for people using products, an unrecognized (until now?) linguistic symptom of the greedy, heedless, wildly unrealistic delusions of our overclass and its market totalitarian epoch?
Monday, December 13th, 2010
Inbound Marketing
Corporate marketing knows no bounds, respects no limits, does not and cannot cease expanding.
The latest frontier? Call centers, which are rapidly taking on the task practitioners call “inbound marketing”:
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Next time you’re on the line with a call center complaining about a product not working properly, don’t be surprised if you’re not rushed off the phone in record speed. The interactions between consumers and call center reps are evolving from hurried griping sessions to extended sales pitches and consultation meetings.
In fact, more and more marketers are looking to turn their call centers into revenue generating centers, according to a new study by Portrait Software, a provider of customer interaction optimization software. A number of factors are driving this shift but none more significant than the challenge of reaching consumers when a growing number of them are opting out of direct mail and email and opting into do-not-call lists. The study shows that 69% of large business-to-consumer marketers view their call centers as “business critical revenue generators.”
And, of course, the whole effort is being scientifically managed:
Apparently, endeavors like Nationwide Insurance are already using such methods “to sell more through inbound service conversations than we do through traditional outbound direct marketing.”
So, when the public-sector spies talk about TIA, they are merely hoping to acquire the beginnings of what our “private-sector” royalists already enjoy.
Wednesday, December 8th, 2010
Cartoon of the Day
Mike Flugennock‘s latest cartoon on Obama and the Democratic Wing of the Business Party.
Tuesday, December 7th, 2010
The Life Cycle of Social Classes
Here’s a new item for those who are, like TCT, tracking the theme of the rise and decline of dominant social classes. The prevailing spin on this new result is to see it as a question of “culture.” In reality it is pure class: the aspiring hegemons are at the top, and the declining emperors are in laughable decline. And it absolutely figures: Comparatively wide-spread educational excellence is meaningful and important in societies whose ruling elites are still young and open enough to at least consider exploring unconventional, reality-based answers. In places like the United States and Britain, meanwhile, the superannuated corporate overclass nailed its windows shut 30+ years ago, and keeps adding new layers of boondoggle and cant to wall out the world. Despite its de rigueur claim to care about “catching up” again, few things would be more threatening to long-established patterns of domestic stratification than a sudden wave of actual concern for good teaching and popular educational advancement.
[Source: The New York Times, December 7, 2010]
