Archive for May, 2011
Tuesday, May 24th, 2011
Why the Internet?
The official story is that the spread of the internet and wireless communications is about the spread of democracy. I take that to be patently preposterous, given the pertinent realities.
Meanwhile, consider the great marketing advantage to it all: By getting us all to participate 24/7/365, the behavioral engineers gain not just an array of spy-cams that make Big Brother purple with envy, but written, quantifiable records the ever-expanding field of “consumer behavior.”
Hence, here is marketing consultant BlueKai Analytics bragging about how its “Intent Data outperforms other data sources by 200 to 300%”:
BlueKai Intent™ is the single, largest source of Intent data qualified by in‐market actions and keyword searches in the world. It is aggregated, real‐time data from top tier websites with unique access to purchase, shopping comparison, and product research behavior from their users. Intent behaviors extracted from these sites include: price search by make and model, destination city for travel or activity on loan calculators, product comparison, or specific keyword searches. Time and again this type of data is highly correlated to consumers who are ready to buy.
Unmatched scale of over 160M in‐market shoppers across 7 key verticals
Strict Intent data qualifications
Data transparency means exact targeting without guessing
Thousands of in‐market attributes provide unparalleled targeting granularity and specificity
Intent data providers include 80% of the top 20 sites in each vertical
In case you feel like making the gesture, here’s the link to BlueKai’s “opt-out” process. [Note: I think it's broken!]
Wednesday, May 18th, 2011
Towels: The Latest Enemy of Capitalism
As somebody once observed, capitalism is a system that cannot stop, cannot rest, cannot respect any boundaries, must colonize everything as it drives its players to “nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish connections everywhere…over the whole face of the globe.”
In this unending totalitarian thrust, any activity that leaves room for further commodification will eventually be seized upon and efforts will be made to increase the degree to which it employs maximally profitable corporate wares. In the process, nothing counts but the bottom line.
And so it is that our old friend the Kimberly-Clark conglomerate is now pushing Kleenex brand hand towels, on the theory that cloth towels are a dire public health risk. Words can’t do justice to the amazing chutzpah of this campaign:
The shamelessness of this stunning proof of capital’s inherent heedlessness does not, of course, stop Kimberly-Clark from claiming that it “challenges itself” to “respect our planet and conserve its resources.”
Orwell was an amateur compared to this stuff.
Thursday, May 12th, 2011
The Human Vector
So, you know how big business marketing is totalitarian and bound to invade every possible nook and niche of personal life?
Dig this latest report on how the professionals are busy analyzing how to manipulate the women whose personages make them the best vectors for conveying implanted corporate capitalist marketing messages to other women:
Marina Maher, which represents such brands as Procter & Gamble Co.’s Head & Shoulders and Cover Girl, Kimberly-Clark Corp.’s Poise and Kotex and Jameson Irish Wiskey, used a survey of more than 2,000 women to identify a group of 12% of women who have outsize influence on the purchase decisions of others.
These “Influence-Hers” have considerably larger social networks — both online and offline — totaling on average about 170 people they interact with regularly, compared with75 for a typical woman, said Marina Maher Managing Director Keith Hughes.
Besides having a larger social circle, they also tend to be more actively engaged with brands. The Influence-Hers are 38% more likely than typical women to “like” brands on Facebook or to provide personal information to brands they like on Facebook. They’re also 105% more likely to post positive experiences and 125% more likely to post negative experiences about brands online.
Creating something of an amplified echo chamber, the Influence-Hers can have a big impact on making Facebook marketing more effective, Mr. Hughes said. Their comments and interactions with brand wall posts are both more frequent and seen by more people, which in turn positively affects brands’ ranking in the algorithm that determines how well posts do in the “Top News” rankings of wall posts.
Turns out that these “[i]nfluential women are themselves more likely than other women to have their purchases influenced by everything from online reviews to expert endorsements.” Hurray!
Of the female influencers, 83% rely on expert reviews very or fairly often; 84% rely on consumer reviews to make purchase decisions; 42% say they’re relying more in the past few years on expert reviews; and 59% are relying more on the reviews of other consumers to make decisions.
They’re also as much as 90% more likely, depending on the category, to value the input of endorsers than other women. So the Influence-Hers both consume and generate far more buzz than other women.
Of course, no one human being packs the buzz impact of Oprah among the buzz generators, who are 76% more likely to read a book endorsed by her than are women generally.
The Influence-Hers are also 55% more likely than other women to go to a restaurant after seeing it on TV and 91% more likely to buy something for her home after seeing it on a morning TV show.
The implications of the research include a need for marketers to look beyond broad Q Scores and favorability ratings when doling out endorsement dollars, Mr. Hughes said (and, not surprisingly, Marina Maher has a proprietary index for that).
“Marketers need to be more targeted and strategic in the way they’re targeting these women,” he said. Among other things, he said brands need to give these highly influential women more opportunities to create and aggregate reviews either on Facebook or websites and to provide them with relevant information they can pass along — both branded and unbranded.
They used to talk about women’s liberation, didn’t they?
Tuesday, May 10th, 2011
Attack of the Feather Brigade
Apparently, the National Wildlife Federation recently “called upon” the powers-that-be to stop using Gross Domestic Product as the main benchmark of human welfare. (Not that you’d ever know it by looking at the NWF homepage, which makes no mention of the news or even the topic.)
NWF types provide this analysis of the situation:
So, our problem is that economic theorists are tricking us all into doing the wrong things?
Poppycock. GDP counts most because our main problem is the cold, hard, in-the-flesh dominion of corporate capitalists over the whole of modern life. GDP is a mere expression of that actual, material dominance. All the special pleading in the world isn’t going to change either capitalism or the way it gets described in the corporate media/corporate politics. This isn’t tiddly-winks.
But such is the state of the greens: So well-indoctrinated and craven, they think hopeless language games are going to flip us toward survival.
And, to add insult to injury, the NWF feather jousters are proposing to count what isn’t countable — particular qualitative states of matter, a.k.a. the remaining unspoiled bits of nature here on middle-aged Earth. GDP counts human labor. No amount of human labor is going to turn smoke, heat, and ashes — or a pack of Charmin Ultra asswipes — back into an old growth tree. That “greens” don’t get this speaks volumes about how very far away we remain from having proper leadership.
Capitalism, we now know, is a pipe-dream, an ecological suicide mission. But it is a suicidal pipe-dream backed by the richest and most ideologically and organizationally powerful overclass in human history. These people are not going to agree to start counting and reporting their destruction. Unless and until those who hope to leave our children a decent world get honest with ourselves and direct with others about what we’re up against, we are simply f—ed. Circumlocution and feigned naivete are not going to cut it. Not by a long shot.
Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011
Digital Wallpaper
Thesis: “Capital is reckless of the health or length of life of the laborer, unless under compulsion from society. To outcries about physical and mental degradation, premature death, the torture of overwork, it answers: “Ought these to trouble us, since they increase our profits?”
Context: Peak energy.
Test: Microsoft’s plans.
