Archive for June, 2011
Tuesday, June 28th, 2011
Anonymizing the System
Americans are well and truly conditioned not just to hate and avoid politics, but also to fuck it up when they wander into it.
Take the rapidly growing “Growth Must End” trope among the technocrats and vaguely frustrated liberals who now serve as leaders of what passes for an environmental movement. It’s a case-in-point.
True enough: Growth must end. And the green activist world is certainly chock-a-block now with such calls. But have you noticed? The “no more growth” harangues almost never mention the c-word: capitalism. Instead, they muse about “our culture” and the supposedly all-powerful pre-suppositions of academic economists. As if we can avoid conflict with the powers that be, and sweet-talk our way to a decent future.
In my opinion, we do not have time for the purely tune-in, turn-on, drop-out strategy implied by the existing “let’s stop growth” crowd, even granting that one is even conceivably possible in this TV-mediated capitalist dictatorship.
If we don’t acknowledge that capitalists are far and away the main force behind growth, we will lose this race, or never even start it, IMHO. Stopping economic growth is a matter of high politics, not personal attitudes. It is not going to happen without the creation of a sharp and radical and honest social movement pushing for profound, collectively-managed social reforms.
BTW, yesterday, I saw a very hip looking chap leaving a Starbucks for his car holding two beverages in paper cups with plastic lids. On his head? A cap with a cute whale logo saying “Live Simply.”
To my eye, the state of that common persona speaks volumes about the limits of waiting for the great drop-out.
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
Facebook’s Clients
After a proper stretch of pretending otherwise in order to attract the sheep into the fold, mega-creep Mark Zuckerberg has recently been admitting what Facebook really is: “Our business is advertising.”
Now that it has the mutton piled high, the disguise is increasingly off.
The latest edition of Advertising Age, for example, reports:
Facebook [is] forming a 12-member client council that will give the social network input on advertising and marketing, it announced today at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
An invitation-only group, the client council will consist of agency leaders as well as Facebook’s biggest global clients, said Facebook VP-Global Ad Sales Carolyn Everson during her Cannes keynote. The members will rotate yearly in order to give different companies a chance to participate and influence Facebook’s various ad offerings, such as the latest “comments” ad unit, which was created in its first collaboration with an advertising agency.
Two of the first 12 members of the inaugural council are Nick Brien, CEO of McCann Worldgroup, and Wendy Clark, Coca-Cola’s head of integrated marketing and communications. “The invites are going to go out next week and we’ll have it locked up in the next 14 days,” Ms. Everson said. The first meeting is planned for the Association of National Advertisers’ confab in October.
“What I’m really interested in is hearing the aggregated interests of other advertisers and see how we can move social-media advertising forward,” said Ms. Clark, who joined Coca-Cola in 2008 after a stint at AT&T. She also has something very particular in mind — reviewing social-media metrics in order to reach consensus on how success is measured in that space. “Comparing myself to myself is fine, but having the context of other advertisers would be great,” Ms. Clark said. “I’d like to see Facebook come out with an accepted benchmark.”
You could say Coca-Cola has earned its place on the council — a top advertiser on Facebook, the company has more than 31 million “likes” on its page.
Facebook wants to know what it can do to improve advertising on its platform by showing major clients its ad products as they are developed. “I would expect an actual dialogue where we bring our engineering team and our marketing team in and get feedback directly,” Ms. Everson said. “It’s important to get kickback from the market. I’m interested in having us solve our clients’ problems and how to help make their business more social at the core.”
“Our clients,” of course, are corporate capitalists. Facebook users? They’re the raw material.
The good news? People might be tiring of the whole banal trick.
Tuesday, June 21st, 2011
Scratch a Hipster…
…find an advertiser.
Per Ad Week:
Gavin McInnes doesn’t care about your product. This would be all well and good if the co-founder of Vice magazine—that bible of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, N.Y., hipsterdom—hadn’t gone and rebranded himself as an adman. But with Rooster, the four-person shop where he is creative director, McInnes has morphed into just that. Housed in a one-room office in SoHo, New York, within spitting distance of major agencies like Saatchi & Saatchi and Euro RSCG, Rooster produces gonzo comedy clips (think Jackass meets Banksy) that happen to be branded.
McInnes’ selling strategy? Advertising that strikes a pose of not being advertising. The reality? McInnes is just another whore tricking people into paying attention to things they don’t want to spend their time on:
[I]t’s a new way to advertise. People are dubious. People are sick of ads. When we did the Vans shoot, we didn’t brand it. And someone in the comments goes, “This better not be a fuckin’ ad for Vans.” People hate ads.
So, McInnes is even more of a liar than your standard marketing operative. Quite an achievement, and very hip, no?
What a culture. Ironic lying for overpriced tennis shoes.
Friday, June 10th, 2011
Market Totalitarianism Update
The usual news, per Advertising Age:
Bluefin Labs is exploring the relationships between listener and speaker, orator and audience, marketer and audience, and mass media and audience by looking at about 3 billion social-media comments a month and, from that, filtering and mapping about 13.7 million comments that pertained to TV and/or commercials.
That mapping of social-media conversations to TV shows and commercials is called the TV genome; Bluefin was founded at MIT as a result of language-acquisition research MIT Researcher Deb Roy did on how his child had learned to talk.
“Mass media has a tremendous benefit in that it reaches many people at the same time, but one of the drawbacks is the feedback loop from audience back to speaker and communicator is essentially broken, or at least you lose much of it,” said Tom Thai, VP-marketing and business development at Bluefin. The idea behind Bluefin is to offer a deeper look at the audience feedback, beyond numbers of viewers and demography. Put simply: It is focused on taking the conversations and chatter that happen in social media and tying them back to the stimulus that caused that conversation on TV — either shows or ads.
The challenge in all of this: help machines understand the semantic layer, or the what the conversation is about. As he describes it, the first input is TV, the second input is social media. The space in the middle is the semantic barrier.
Bluefin itself:
Today, the Bluefin technology platform has a view into over 3 billion public-facing social media comments each month, tied to a continuously growing video fingerprint archive of over 200,000 distinct airings of TV shows and commercials. Bluefin currently ingests and performs video fingerprinting of close to 50 U.S. TV broadcast and cable networks, with plans to achieve full coverage of the national TV market.
Thus, for marketers and TV content producers, Bluefin’s technology solves a problem that has eluded the TV industry for more than 60 years: how to close the audience feedback loop of TV mass media.
Bluefin is currently running exclusive private pilots with several Fortune 100 global brands, leading ad agencies, and TV networks.
Such was the publicly subsidized cutting edge of social science in the United States in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Your grandchildren, should any ever come to exist, will be amazed, and furious.
Wednesday, June 1st, 2011
Electricity: Not Magic
The official story is that the “electric” car is going to save capitalism.
I put “electric” in quotation marks because electricity is always made from something other than itself, usually fossil fuel combustion or nuclear fission.
But it is also important to notice that denial of sources is not the only layer of magical thinking inherent to the growing cult of the electric car.
The second layer has to do with the inherent inefficiency of electricity generation and use.
To understand that, take a look at this excellent article by Kris De Decker at Low-Tech Magazine. De Decker explains the basic physical facts about the inescapable problems with burning energy to make electricity:
First of all, it is important to know that generating electricity is far from the most efficient way to apply pedal power, due to the internal energy losses in the battery, the battery management system, other electronic parts, and the motor/generator.
These energy losses add up quickly: 10 to 35 percent in the battery, 10 to 20 percent in the motor/generator and 5 to 15 percent in the converter (which converts direct current to alternate current). The energy loss in the voltage regulator (or DC to DC converter, which prevents you from blowing up the battery) is about 25 percent.
This means that the total energy loss in a pedal powered generator will be 42 to 67.5 percent (calculation example for highest loss: 100 watt input = 80 watt after 20% loss in motor/generator = 57.5 watts after 25% energy loss in voltage regulator = 37.5 watts after 35% loss in battery = 32.5 watts after 15% loss in converter = 32.5 watts output = efficiency of 32.5% or energy loss of 67.5%).
De Decker also touches upon another decidedly non-magical aspect of electric machinery — the ecological and energy problems with batteries and steel:
[T]he embodied energy of a 150Wh lead-acid battery (like the one offered with the Windstream pedal power generator) is at least 37,500 Wh, which equals 250 full charges of the battery (more sources: 1/2). In other words: if you can deliver 75 watts of power to the battery, you have to pedal for 500 hours in order to generate the energy that was needed to manufacture the battery. Because the life expectancy of a lead-acid battery can be as low as 300 discharge/charge cycles, you are basically pedaling to produce the energy required to manufacture the battery.
Lead acid battery Of course, it also takes energy to manufacture a pedal powered machine that does not take the intermediate step of generating electricity. This concern lies mainly with the production of steel, and quite a lot of it. The commercially available Fender Blender mentioned earlier weighs 25kg (55 pounds).
If made from recycled steel, and using these figures to calculate the embodied energy of steel, this comes down to an energy cost of at least 41,625 Wh, slightly more than the battery needed for the electricity generator. If freshly made steel is used, the embodied energy is at least 138,750 Wh (3.7 times the embodied energy of a single battery).
De Decker’s conclusion?
When operating a bicycle generator you are basically pedaling to produce the energy required to manufacture the battery.
All these costs apply to automobiles, too, despite their indispensability to capitalists. Imagine how that pencils out!
