Archive for March, 2011
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
The Basis of “Private”/”Free” Enterprise
History shows that, stunning as the thought is, state legislatures in the USA are more, not less, dominated by business lobbying than is the federal government. And that dominance is certainly even greater in the South, where white people remain staggering deluded about themselves and the realities of their society and world.
So, it’s really not very surprising that North Carolina legislators are presently strangling public, not-for-profit provision of internet services. Clearly, the reason is that such services are a mortal threat to corporate revenue streams. The simple fact is that telecommunications services can be more efficiently, effectively, and cheaply provided by the public than by capitalists.
So, the North Carolina legislature is simply going to pass a law that artificially imposes all the irrationalities — and more — of the private sector on the public sector.
Remember this the next time you see some wanker talking about the supposed naturalness and glory of “private enterprise.”
Monday, March 28th, 2011
Now, This Makes Sense
It’s about damned time! Finally, marketing is reaching into our glorious world-leading prison system! And this, God’s chosen country with its obviously best of all possible socio-economic systems, simply cannot afford to miss out on all those opportunities to build brand-consciousness.
Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011
Spybook
While vacationing this week, I had the displeasure of sitting through much of The Social Network. Before I saw it, I was virtually certain that it would do for Facebook what its screenwriter Aaron Sorkin did for the U.S. Presidency, namely execute a clever but thorough whitewash. I was right. A rock should fall on all the pampered, egocentric ciphers behind Facebook. But, by exploiting the old “They just wanted to watch the money” principle, Sorkin manages to flip the inklings of that sentiment and make all the vacant psychos involved seem somehow cool and aspirational. Indeed, the last line in the film is about how Mark Zuckerberg is “the world’s youngest billionaire.”
Sorkin’s film is, of course, silent on the ulterior purpose of Facebook, which is to deploy what appears to be just a new way to stay in touch with friends but is actually a huge, screamingly invasive and profitable engine for marketing research, a.k.a. corporate spying.
Here is a snip from today’s Advertising Age on Facebook’s latest advance:
This month — and for the first time — Facebook started to mine real-time conversations to target ads. The delivery model is being tested by only 1% of Facebook users worldwide. On Facebook, that’s a focus group 6 million people strong.
The closest Facebook has come to real-time advertising has been with its most recent ad offering, known as sponsored stories, which repost users’ brand interactions as an ad on the side bar. But for the 6 million users involved in this test, any utterance will become fodder for real-time targeted ads.
For example: Users who update their status with “Mmm, I could go for some pizza tonight,” could get an ad or a coupon from Domino’s, Papa John’s or Pizza Hut.
The real story of Facebook is that, as “social networking” software, it was a moderately clever idea and minor technological breakthrough. The government, if it were ever allowed to compete with private enterprises, could sponsor or directly develop an excellent substitute for that in a month, and make it non-commercial and secure. But that wouldn’t serve the corporate overclass, would it? They are looking — and paying — for exactly what Zuckerberg and his buddies are providing: new ways of gathering free information about the details of people’s off-the-job activities.
None of that makes it into Sorkin’s sly, product-placing paean to privileged whoredom.
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011
Sports and Corporate Capitalism
A reader asks what the TCT take on sports might be.
I tend to like what Chomsky says on this subject, on which he also says he gets the most hate mail. Basically, he argues that sports provide men with a way to exercise their minds and their senses of passion and commitment, but all in a completely irrational, diversionary form. This function is both attractive and crucial in a society where the chances for most of us to do those two things in productive, meaningful ways are small and dwindling, and also anathema to the overclass.
Of course, we also know spectator sports is a huge marketing vehicle, a way of attracting eyeballs and eardrums to involuntary shopping and brand consciousness/mind-conditioning activities.
Advertising Age, for example, has recently been fretting about the serious blow to corporate marketing that will result if there is a lockout that cancels or postpones the National Football League schedule next season. In such insider discussions, one often sees the truth all too clearly. Here, for example, are the words of one Dave Morgan, “CEO and founder of New York-based Simulmedia, a TV ad targeting company…[that] uses data-driven technology to help improve the relevance and results of TV advertising”:
Losing the NFL will put a number of TV networks and advertisers on the hot seat.
NFL games drive tens of millions of weekly viewers to game broadcasts and related coverage on CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN and their local affiliates. Dozens of consumer marketers, with names like Budweiser, AT&T, Ford, Geico, McDonald’s and Southwest Airlines, build billions of dollars in national media plans around NFL games and their massive reach. To make matters worse, the networks themselves depend on NFL games to promote their weekday prime-time programming, upcoming specials and season premieres. In fact, program promotion is big factor in the networks’ willingness to pay premiums in their NFL broadcast deals. No NFL means a tough fall and winter for teams, fans, marketers and broadcasters.
Won’t be easy. Finding cost-effective replacements for those millions of viewers NFL games provide and the $3 billion-plus in attendant ad spending will not be easy. No matter how hard the TV networks work to create replacement programming, whether it is movies, secondary sports, minor league football or Sunday afternoon reality shows, it won’t be the NFL and it won’t deliver the enormous crossover audiences that the NFL has. If fragmentation of TV audiences was bad before, it will get a lot worse with no NFL. [Source: Advertising Age, March 15, 2011]
Such talk — “driving” people like so many steer to the slaughterhouse — is absolutely the standard language and attitude of big business marketing, which, as documented in the TCT book, is neither more nor less than application of scientific management principles to people’s off-the-job behaviors.
Preserving the reign of television-watching, which has the very great marketing advantage of being a mildly addictive habit, is always of great concern to marketers, as you can see from Mr. Morgan’s analysis. And, of course, spectator sports are a perfect fit for commercial TV, as they draw attention and passion, but not in too intense or too political a way. On this, I would suggest that the Manufacturing Consent model is useful for predicting not just which stories and perspectives make the news, but also what types of entertainment programming will and will not make it onto the air.
Finally, what about playing sports? I have mixed feelings here. Obviously, people will always play games and sports for fun, and I’m all for freedom and public facilitation of this demotic option. But, as a parent, I would suggest that, even in this somewhat better sphere, our culture is still quite crazy. People now stick kids into carefully organized and intensely competitive soccer and basketball leagues at the tenderest ages, and, if the truth be told, much of the way we run our high schools (i.e. very early starts to school for a population at the height of its need for sleep, all to make after-school sports practices more convenient) is also dictated by sports considerations.
Finally, I suppose I think the mania for sports is also a logical by-product of corporate capitalism’s comprehensive, progressive destruction of meaningful physical work. At home, we watch “American Idol” (this show ranks #1 among all programs in what marketers call “viewer engagement”) or “The Office,” and throw frozen pizzas into the oven. As we do, things like gardening and cooking and carpentry skills fade into history. In the realm of the economy, downsizing, automation, commodification, commercialism, and globalization are all making industrial labor not only more deskilled than ever, but almost as small a part of the overall opportunity structure as farming. The Fortune 500 sells the lion’s share of products, but employs a small and always shrinking share of the world’s workforce.
In a world that desperately needs to find ways to move away from capitalists’ heedless, sociocidal priorities, the prevailing life of button-pushing and screen-staring leaves people desperate for ways of at least seeing somebody else perform highly skilled tasks with passionately learned and maintained physical movements. I think sports allow us to imagine that we somehow value such things, even as we all turn to discombobulated mush, a.k.a. ideal “consumers.”
If we are lucky and smart, we might get the chance to build a new world that genuinely unlocks and rebalances life. If that happens, we’ll get a lot saner about sports.
Tuesday, March 15th, 2011
TV as Spyware
Been a while since I reported on the corporate capitalists’ progress in turning home television equipment into marketing spyware. As always, the progress is rapid.
Rentrak Corporation, headquartered in the same city as TCT, describes its work thus:
Rentrak is the television ratings database currency that measures local television and cable channels at a granular level in 210 markets across the United States. The service incorporates data from over 17 million televisions and is the only fully integrated system of detailed satellite, telco and cable TV viewing data commercially available that combines TV viewing information with consumer segmentation systems so advertisers can effectively reach their true consumer targets.
Big Brother was an amateur.
Sunday, March 13th, 2011
A Note on Art and Capitalism
As the United States hurtles toward catastrophe and collapse, the gulf between its problems and the content of its drama, to say nothing of what passes for its journalism, yawns ever wider. As rapidly as energy crisis, economic royalism, military lawlessness, and ecological holocaust unfold, so grows the vacuity of stage and screen.
Case in point: Spiderman, yes, Spiderman, the musical. Surely planned as the ultimate money-making operation ever on Broadway, this shitheap is apparently instead proving that, at some point, exploitation and commercialism and willful adolescence must meet the laws of physics and societies.
Per The New York Times:
Once envisioned as a $25 million musical, “Spider-Man” is now the most expensive ever. Four cast members have been injured, one seriously. Three lead actors left. Flying scenes have regularly malfunctioned. Money nearly ran out at one point. Reviews have been terrible, and some actors are trying to get out of their contracts early.
All in the name of dramatizing a comic book for pre-teens!
One can only hope that the always modest* yet somehow tax-dodging, butt-kissing creep Paul David Hewson, a.k.a. Bono, not only had a major hand in the musical scoring of this nightmare, but is also one of its primary investors. Tell us, kind Sir, how much could many places in Africa use the $65 million dollars that have been dumped into this cynical ploy?
*Bono on His (and I do mean capital-H “His”) Spiderman work: “Creating art that has never been done before is the reason I get out of bed in the morning.”
