Archive for July, 2011
Monday, July 25th, 2011
Piling Up the Fs
While it remains a myth that, in the United States, the period from 1945 to 1980 was marked by increasing egalitarianism, neither was it a time of sharply increasing class exploitation. Then came the Great Restoration, as the overclass decided to get tougher and to step up its political salesmanship. Making more war, jailing more criminals, privatizing everything in sight were the secondary policies. At the core, of course, was “supply-side economics,” or the assertion that providing the rich with more and more money is the key to a permanent economic boom and the best of all possible societies. The rich invest, so the richer they are, the more they’ll invest, right?
Although the corporate media are incapable of asking the question, we might do so: How is this set of claims proving out? What grade should we, the citizens, award for the ongoing experiment in letting corporate capital dictate everything to a human society?
Well, as TCT readers know, the conditions for assessment could hardly be better. The overclass has been raking in cash right throughout the past several years. And the latest results? The Associated Press reports them:
NEW YORK — So much for fears that U.S. companies might stall out in the economy’s soft patch.
Corporate profits are coming in better than expected so far in second-quarter earnings season despite concerns about the potential for trouble ahead.
“The corporate sector’s in great shape,” says Joseph LaVorgna, chief U.S. economist at Deutsche Bank.
All told, 148 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500 index have reported earnings and 73 percent have beaten the expectations of Wall Street. That’s somewhat ahead of the typical pace of two-thirds that surpass estimates.
Companies that had reported as of Friday had $24.52 per share in operating earnings — profits before subtracting interest and tax expenses — according to S&P senior index analyst Howard Silverblatt. The record of $24.06 per share was set in the second quarter of 2007.
Coming out of the recession, corporations first reported explosive earnings growth early last year. The pace has slowed, but it’s still going. At the current rate, second-quarter earnings would be 17 percent better than a year ago.
So, on supply-side/Great Restoration theory, we are now experiencing an investment boom and full employment.
Can you say epic fail?
Friday, July 22nd, 2011
Another Sociopathic Hipster
Our parade of pony-tailed social engineers continues today with the illustrious Jeff Goodby, whose agency just released this brazenly sexist and pseudo-scientific [and now withdrawn!] ad campaign for the California Milk Processor Board.
The ads are clearly targeted at men, whom they flatter by endorsing both the idea that stale pieces of misogyny are somehow wildly funny and the counterfactual suggestion that men themselves are going around being minutely careful about how they treat women.
Here’s how Goodby gets his laughs, meanwhile:
The idea, says Jeff Goodby, who shares the title of co-chairman at Goodby, Silverstein with Rich Silverstein, is to “enlist the spouse or significant other” of women to encourage them to drink milk.
“We did it in the past, but the women just didn’t drink enough milk,” he says, laughing. “If they’d only drink enough, we wouldn’t come back.” [NYT, 07/11/2011]
Haw, haw, haw! Isn’t recycling sexism to force-feed cow milk to an overweight population on behalf of factory farming, rBGH-injecting profiteers just a hoot?
And if you believe there really is any such thing with these people as “drink enough milk” or “we wouldn’t come back,” well, I can also get you a really excellent deal on the Brooklyn Bridge…
Thursday, July 21st, 2011
And the Trappie Goes to…
I know 2011 isn’t over, but there is next to no chance that there will be a worse TCT-related movie this year than the utterly, massively, screamingly terrible Consumed: Inside the Belly of the Beast, recipient of the coveted Trappie Award for the worst documentary film of the year.
Billed as “a compelling documentary about modern consumerist culture,” the film is chock full of pompous idiots who spout preposterous pronouncements that are as historically and institutionally ignorant as they are insultingly wrong about ordinary people* and obscurantist and exculpatory of overclass practices.
Watch the trailer, and you’ll find some ridiculous academic clown (I intend to identify the fool as soon as possible and name him to the DbC Hall of Mirrors) stating that “We all have this weird mental disease called consumerism. We’ve all kind of gone collectively psychotic.” You’ll also hear this alleged pandemic described as a “very natural human process.” Marketing gets fleetingly mentioned, but the movie treats it as a mere symptom of the underlying problem of “what we are” — crazy consumers.
Corporate capitalists, who coined and spread the word “consumer” in the first place, must be peeing themselves with delight at the appearance of such unintentionally Orwellian drivel.
Of course, the liberal greens are eating it all up, no questions asked.
By the way, among the string of howlers in just the trailer alone is the line: “We’re at the cutting edge of evolution.”
Excuse me, but ROFLMFAO, you supposed deep thinkers and experts! News Flash: Evolution has no cutting edge. To have a cutting edge, there has to be a dominant or intended direction. As Stephen Jay Gould explained over and over, human beings are both a kind of wild miracle and also nothing more than “a tiny twig on the floridly arborescent tree of life.” This elementary point is the stuff of Science 101, which one would hope self-promoting pontificators about the nature and logic of “modern culture” might perhaps have digested before distributing their glossy films.
Of course, the wankers behind this steaming turd of a movie know even less about capitalism than they do about science, so it’s all par for their course.
*Contrast these talking heads’ “diagnosis” that we’re all a bunch of Paris Hiltons with this bit of real-world news:
U.S. Consumers Relying on Credit for Basic Necessities
I’ll say it again: Using the word “consumer” short-circuits attention to reality.
Wednesday, July 20th, 2011
Skateboarding for the Overclass
To continue this week’s theme of pondering the high quotient of deluded posers in the marketing trade, meet Adam Roe, whose Lunchbox “shopper marketing” agency just got bought by the venerable social engineering conglomerate JWT.
Like our friend, the grimacing but allegedly always laughing Bob Knorpp, Mr. Roe presents himself as ultra-hip and creative and just about as funny as the day is long.
Meanwhile, here is Mr. Roe’s client list.
And here is Roe’s soulful explanation of the meaning of his latest sellout:
We are now all closely measured by sales, which makes the role of shopper solutions ever more critical, yet the sale starts long before the customer ever gets to the shelf and often long before it gets to us. By joining forces, JWT and Lunchbox offer brands, retailers and shoppers an unstoppable solution from start to finish. [Source: Advertising Age]
Yes, this is all about simultaneously serving the needs of both “brands” and shoppers. Sure. Never mind that Roe refers to the latter as “it” in this very statement, as he also undoubtedly does when practicing his craft.
Monday, July 18th, 2011
Delusion is as Delusion Does
The gent at left is Bob Knorpp, “president of the Cool Beans Group, a marketing strategy consultancy based in New York. He likes laughing even more than breathing.”
Discussion question: Why is the marketing world so full of men who look and talk like this, while serving a function in the society that would embarrass most PropDep overseers? Is it a simple case of spending too much time around dishonesty? Or is it some form of attempted psychological compensation?
In any event, compare Mr. Knorpp’s whimsical self-presentation with the way he talks about you and me:
There’s still an irresistible urge to build an audience at scale. We feel we need to get our message in front of as many people as possible, so we we put all of our efforts into generating followers and likes and +1s. Then once we build this mass audience, we communicate with it and many times sell against it. And we keep being confronted by the fact that this audience is still too small, compared with the larger audiences of traditional and digital ad spending. Thus we dismiss these micro audiences, or at the most, treat them as quaint test projects.
Yet as those direct-marketing models that we were working with two decades ago proved, there’s real value hiding within the smaller subsets of any aggregate audience — a value we are simply not tapping.
There is a place and a time for reaching an audience at scale. Paid media and mass reach are still very effective methods of spreading a message. But in the case of many of our social efforts, this mass philosophy is actually damaging the relationship with our community leaders. So while the metrics may show increased interaction, the value of the engagements may actually be lessening.
A community is an organic thing. It is much different than a customer file. It is a place where our customers might be interacting with each other as much as with us. So we need models and programs that recognize this intangible as a valuable asset.
What do you think happens to an advocate whose voice is suddenly drowned out? We can’t always say with statistical certainty, but common sense tells us he or she may stop talking. The advocate is no longer special. We’ve destroyed her bully pulpit. So off she goes.
The ironic thing is that it’s not hard to identify an influential advocate in an existing, functioning community. There are third-party modeling tools to be sure, but an active community manager can provide you with a list within a few days. And we can still grow the community to scale by targeting these folks — and probably do so for less effort and money spent. It may not happen as quickly, but it will happen more intelligently, scaling the influence of your advocates right alongside your follower counts, and building a community that is engaged rather than simply wondering why they are there.
We may or may not get to a model one day for the social spaces that is as effective at targeting loyalists as Ward’s model was in the direct space. But there is no doubt that most of us are not properly valuing the advantages of working with smaller, more engaged audiences. Until we consider how our mass approaches are affecting this advocate value, we will fail to realize the full benefits of [Facebook marketing] programs and miss the path to profitability that is present in these more engaged connections. [Source: Advertising Age]
Scratch a hippie, find a profit-seeking social engineer.
Wednesday, July 6th, 2011
More Secondary Leadership
This “degrowth” special pleading is really getting to be a massive wipe-out. Green liberals who’ve spent their entire lives avoiding dangerous ideas are now preaching to all of us to give up our insistence on perpetual economic growth. The gentleman at the left is but the latest purveyor of the half-baked, half-informed trope.
The word “capitalism” is, as always, very conspicuously, if not studiously, absent from this man’s supposedly “deep green” writing about “degrowth.”
Meanwhile, the blame for never-named capitalist behavior is nevertheless held to belong to all of us together:
But degrowth is not just a rallying cry or a trivial idea. Degrowth is an important, natural concept that our society needs to understand, whether we call it Degrowth, Limits to Growth, Costs of Complexity, Overshoot, Carrying Capacity, Metabolic Costs, Diminishing Returns on Innovation, Entropic Limits, “The Meek Shall inherit the Earth,” or “Richer lives, simpler means” as Arne Naess said.
The problem for our society is not that these ideas are too complex or wrong, but that they are annoying and inconvenient for the wealthy and powerful. Everyone wants more. Millionaires want to be a billionaires. The more that individuals grab and horde, the less there is for everyone.
See? Capitalists are merely us writ large, and we are they, writ small. We are all equally covetous. The rule of billionaires is one and the same thing as Joe or Jane Sixpack making toast in the morning and going to work. See? See? Shame on us all!
And here is what passes for the relevant underlying sociology/anthropology among these degrowth preachers:
Naturally, people resist the idea of limits on their consumption. The instincts to grow were forged in natural evolution, but those instincts don’t make limits disappear.
This whopper, this sophomoric howler of a claim that capitalist greed goes all the way back to hunter-gatherer times regardless of institutional and historical context, comes not just anywhere, but in an article about the politics of contemporary, 21st century economic growth and “consumption,” in an essay that never once mentions capitalism or marketing or advertising or institutional power of any kind!
As for solutions, other than collective shame, we get this, from a would-be leader who cautions his audience against “wishful thinking”:
If our social, political, and economic planners actually understood ecosystems, we might avoid a lot of problems we face.
ROFLMFAO! Dude, what planet are you living on? Not only are “our” planners not “ours,” they don’t give a flying fuck about ecosystems. Their system doesn’t permit it. Christ, look out the window, man! Read a newspaper. Pull your head out.
I have to say, the whole thing, the blind, craven special pleading toward power and the baseless insults and burdens cast upon the little people, brings to mind Theodor Adorno’s analysis of Nazi ideology, and its reliance on “a regressive repersonalization of impersonal, detached social powers.”
Often peddled by people aspiring to become “great little men” or “secondary leaders,” the hallmark of such “repersonalization” was a combination of upward sycophancy/sociological blindness and downward elitism/arbitrary, personalized blame:
Hitler’s famous formula, “Verantwortung nach oben, Autorität nach unten,” (“responsibility to overs, authority to unders”) nicely rationalizes this character’s ambivalence. The tendency to tread on those below, which manifests itself so disastrously in the persecution of weak and helpless minorities, is as outspoken as the hatred against those outside. In practice, both tendencies quite frequently fall together.
German folklore has a drastic symbol for this trait. It speaks of Radfahrernaturen, bicyclist’s characters. “Above they bow, they kick below.”
Sound familiar? There may not be as much turf between facsism and modern liberalism as we tend to think.
