The Consumer Trap

Archive for the 'Corporate Marketing 101' Category

Monday, August 30th, 2010

Unseriousness is Everywhere

Under market totalitarianism, only unserious solutions to problems are eligible for consideration.

Consider the Clintonian tobacco settlement, which uses corporate tobacco money to hire corporate capitalist ad agencies to make advertisements nominally devoted to discouraging smoking, then purchases time to run those ads within commercial media.

Not only does this mean that foxes end up making the supposedly anti-fox-in-the-henhouse imagery, but the results are created with a careful eye to not upsetting the commercial media outlets in which they run.

Results? Instead of searing pictures of people being treated for and dying from lung cancer and COPD, this:

Thursday, August 19th, 2010

“The Role of the Consumer”

When they feel they’re safely talking amongst themselves, big business marketers get honest.  Take the case of a thought piece in the latest issue of Advertising Age by one Andy Gould, senior VP of an ad agency in Kalamazoo, Michigan.  Gould’s complaint:

Too Many Campaigns Still Ignoring the Role of the Consumer

OK.  So what is “the role of the consumer”?  Perhaps being asked whether you think using old growth timber to make toilet paper softer is something our society should be tolerating?

Not quite.  Turns out the role Gould, whose firm works on the Cottonelle account for Kimberly-Clark, has reserved for “the consumer” is rather less substantial:

As I look back at two of our most successful campaigns this year, all the agencies involved identified the role of the consumer very early on. For Cottonelle’s Roll Poll, we decided every piece of communication should be geared toward getting people to vote on which way they rolled their toilet paper (over or under). For the Pop-Tarts Flavor Tournament, we wanted to put 20 flavors head to head in a March-Madness-style bracket, and have teens influence the outcome of each matchup until we had named a champion. Determining these things at the beginning of the process (at the same time as the messaging piece) gave us the time to make the work more interactive, and allowed us to structure things so that what users did and said during the campaign actually impacted the creative work.

Giving consumers something to do is one of the musts of digital work, but even outside of the digital realm, I think many of us believe it’s the best way to connect with people today. Doesn’t work that actually requires something of the consumer stand a better chance of creating genuine impact

And some people still dare to suggest that capitalism and democracy are two different things!

Friday, August 6th, 2010

The March of Marketing Surveillance

Neither recession nor depression shall slow the spread of corporate marketing’s Census-dwarfing surveillance on American households.

For those tracking this inexorable totalitarian phenomenon, The Wall Street Journal has been running a useful series. For those who know the institutional reasons, the main pattern is entirely unsurprising:

The [WSJ] conducted a comprehensive study that assesses and analyzes the broad array of cookies and other surveillance technology that companies are deploying on Internet users. It reveals that the tracking of consumers has grown both far more pervasive and far more intrusive than is realized by all but a handful of people in the vanguard of the industry.

Unauthorized placement of spyware is large:

The study found that the nation’s 50 top websites on average installed 64 pieces of tracking technology onto the computers of visitors, usually with no warning. A dozen sites each installed more than a hundred.

It is also increasingly powerful:

Tracking technology is getting smarter and more intrusive. Monitoring used to be limited mainly to “cookie” files that record websites people visit. But the Journal found new tools that scan in real time what people are doing on a Web page, then instantly assess location, income, shopping interests and even medical conditions. Some tools surreptitiously re-spawn themselves even after users try to delete them. These profiles of individuals, constantly refreshed, are bought and sold on stock-market-like exchanges that have sprung up in the past 18 months.

“It is a sea change in the way the industry works,” says Omar Tawakol, CEO of BlueKai. “Advertisers want to buy access to people, not Web pages.”

Interestingly, it is also another very powerful argument in favor of public enterprise and nationalization of our communications infrastructure. Wikipedia, a non-profit, somehow manages to thrive without planting any spy code.

Friday, July 2nd, 2010

Adman Fired for Exhibiting Tiny Scruple

This gent here — dig the name, Orwell fans — is Alex Bogusky, ad agency ex-wonder boy (who’s 47, of course).  Mr. Bogusky sold his small marketing consulting firm to a larger corporate parent agency a few years back.  Now, he has been essentially fired because he holds and publicly reveals views such as these:

As we took on the BK account, we politely offered that we could not work on that part of their marketing. And in subsequent years we declined multiple invitations to work on the kids’ business. Once one of our adult spots for ‘SpongeBob SquarePants’ (hard to believe, but young adults love Sponge Bob) was repurposed and re-edited by another agency to add toy footage and aired on Nick. I was livid and we got it pulled.

“It’s not a matter of the rightness or wrongness of the products being advertised. That is a grey [ed. note: note the hip Brit spelling and Mr. B's lack of said color on his equally hip mane] area. But there are children and there are adults. And the duty of adults in society is to protect its children. And that is black and white.”

Such are the institutional strictures of professional marketing.  The lords of the universe tolerate no dissent, no matter how puny and peripheral.

Thursday, June 3rd, 2010

Dawn of Death: The Apex of Shamelessness

Partly for intellectual/political reasons and partly because I grew up on the habit, I still watch some television. Last night, I nearly choked on my frozen yogurt when I saw this especially stunning mind-rape come on:

Now, I’m no greenhorn when it comes to the mega-chutzpah that goes into the planning and production of corporate marketing campaigns, which, with the possible exception of organized monotheism, are far and away the most carefully considered and lavishly funded form of dishonesty in human history.

But this just takes the fucking cake, here, folks.

What is the point of de-oiling animals after they have been exposed to petroleum leaks? The Procter and Gamble (Dawn is a P & G brand) ad above would have you believe that it is a simple rescue mission that yields lovely, happy-bunny outcomes. Wash the oil off the feathers or fur, and the critter goes home just fine and dandy. Maybe even cleaner and better!

Let’s leave aside the obvious question of going home to what — the same ecosystem in which they just got oiled, the one to which they were born and are adapted?

At the level of the animal itself, petroleum-soaked feathers or fur, serious as it is, is only the secondary problem. The primary problem is oral ingestion or dermal absorption of oil. Swallowing or soaking in petroleum is a catastrophe to the organism:

Because birds preen themselves meticulously to maintain their insulating air layer, external oiling almost always leads to some oil ingestion. Once oil is ingested, it can cause direct damage to the gastrointestinal tract, evidenced by ulcers, diarrhea, and a decreased ability to absorb nutrients. If the volatile components of the oil are inhaled, it can lead to pneumonia, neurological damage, or absorption of chemicals that can lead to cancer. Metabolism of the oil components by the kidney and liver can lead to extensive damage to those organs as well. Lastly, oil (and the stress of being oiled) can cause birds to have significant anemia and the lack of blood cells that combat infection.

The impact on bird eggs and bird and animal babies is worse.

So, what is the above advertisement for Dawn dish soap? It is a knowing lie, designed to get people to pay a premium for Procter and Gamble’s heavily advertised brand of liquid soap. As all marketing planners know, “a sure-fire way to get consumers to pay more for our products even in these difficult times is to make some ‘green’ claims.”

In reality, then, the above ad is nothing more and nothing less than this: the use of the gargantuan, heart-rending, only-just-begun biological destruction from the Deepwater Horizon blowout as a photo-op for raking in more profits for P & G shareholders, all while sowing Satanic disinformation about the very reality troubling the very victims of the scam.

And, of course, it gets worse. Serious studies of bird survival after petroleum exposure show that “rescuing” birds ranges from being somewhat helpful to being utterly futile and inhumane.

And guess which organization is working to sell the rosiest possible view? That’s right: The International Bird Rescue Research Center, the very group to which P & G sends money as part of this marketing scheme.

The very group whose executive director writes letters of praise to P & G.

The very group that says this on its FAQ page:

Q: What do you use to wash birds?

A: We use “Dawn” dish washing liquid. IBRRC has conducted research on most of the commonly available cleaning agents and “Dawn” meets all the criteria we have established for appropriate cleaning agents. Those criteria are the ability to remove most oils, effectiveness at low concentrations, non-irritating to the skin and eyes, rapid removal from feathers (rinsing), and is easily accessible. Procter and Gamble now donates all “Dawn” detergent to IBRRC and other rehabilitation organizations.

The very group that answers another key FAQ thus:

Q: What is your survival rate?

A: The survival rate will differ with each oil spill because of all the factors that effect it. Some of those factors are the toxicity of the oil, how rapidly the birds are collected and stabilized, what condition the bird was in before it was oiled, and the species involved. We have had release rates as high as 100% and as low as 25% in the early years. We now average about 50% to 80%. Again, it depends on many variables and cannot be predicted.

Did you catch that liar’s shift? What is your survival rate? We won’t say, but here are some statistics about our RELEASE rate.

In other words, the IBRRC is a Procter and Gamble front, a mere pimp for P & G’s “cherished strategy of introducing increasingly sophisticated — and increasingly costly — household staples.”

By the way, a regular 24.0z bottle of Dawn liquid dishwashing detergent presently sells for $5.49, or 22.9 cents per ounce on drugstore.com. I guarantee you that the dollar stores my grandmother frequents sell an indistinguishable product for one dollar.

I can only quote, once again, from the late Robert L. Heilbroner:

At a business forum, I was once brash enough to say that I thought the main cultural impact of television advertising was to teach children that grown-ups told lies for money. How strong, deep, or sustaining can be the values of a civilization that generates a ceaseless flow of half-truths and careful deceptions?

Sunday, May 23rd, 2010

Annals of Commodification: Hair Dye

Apparently, “there is no visible gray hair on the heads of any of the 16 female United States senators, ages 46 to 74.”

Meanwhile, plastic surgery, on which privileged people around the world now spend over $30 billion a year, has been expanding by 25% annually.

To my eye, these trends denote several things, including: anti-feminism; a childish (and heavily sponsored) denial of aging; comically bad aesthetics; and, in a supposedly “Christian” nation-state, a profound solipsistic insensitivity to the distribution of world income and wealth.

But the hair coloring craze is not all pull. It’s also a product of the power of corporate capitalism’s marketing juggernaut, which leaves no stone unturned in its drive to commercialize and commodify every possible aspect of human life.  Gray hair?  That’s just another major business opportunity.

The success of the overclass push — despite its venality, its ecological costs, and its moral status in a world where half the people live on less than $2.50 a day and 80 percent less than $10 a day — to sell people (often toxic) patently insipid age-denial goods can be inferred from insider research reports such as this:

Despite the economic downturn, the personal care industry remains an attractive market for suppliers of performance ingredients aimed at delivering the results consumers demand from hair and skin products. The market is ripe for savvy suppliers who can find the right niche and the right buyers for their innovative products to capitalize on the demand for anti-aging, anti-wrinkle, and other products.

Thus does our hagged-out empire stumble on, hoping that putting wigs on cadavers will somehow dispel the rapidly worsening facts.