Since then, events have proceeded in such a way as to push TCT to proffer a new thesis, one that TCT hereby states as a 97 percent serious, 3 percent hyperbolic claim: In corporate capitalist America, electoral politics is a mere marketing operation.

Selling is the foundational reality, market research and advertising the basis for every peep of the communication and action that comprise an “election.” Brands never change, though their respective sales trends wax and wane.  Choice attaches entirely to the minutiae of style and microscopic difference that undergird almost meaningless product differentiation.  The degree of democracy involved is perhaps — a big perhaps — 3 percent greater than in economic marketing of goods and services, where it is vanishingly small. In both processes, the odds of the masses changing the range of choices offered by those with the money and the power is exceedingly low.  Coke or Pepsi.  Jack Johnson or John Jackson.

And, just as in regular product marketing, the amount of money spent from above always increases.

Enter, on cue, Visa’s new Facebook “app,” the Visa Memory Mapper. The users of this scheme take vacations and, during or after, upload photos of their trips, add captions explaining the photos, and then select music and formats to turn the photos and captions into a “movie” about the vacation in question. All, purportedly, in the name of recording memories.

One might begin to sense the rat here when one reflects upon the true relationship between cameras, Facebooking, and experiences of uncommon or new locales. Which is likely to yield better memories — immersing oneself in a place with perhaps a few quick photos taken, or having a camera glued to one’s nose for a serious share of time in a spot? What possible place does Facebook have in the process?

The JWT Intelligence (yes, an arm of that JWT) blog clarifies the real logic:

Where travelers of old shared (and bragged about) their activities upon returning home, today’s hyper-connected and mobile-enabled vacationers enjoy the instant gratification of doing so on social networks in real time. These updates amplify the travel experience, providing the opportunity to broadcast how cool (or privileged, worldly, etc.) the traveler is, boosting the person’s social currency. Indeed, one-third of respondents in JWT’s U.K. and U.S. survey agreed that “Sharing my travel activities makes me stand out from everyone else’s activities in my social network.” Visa is smartly tapping into this new social currency by facilitating online boasting for its customers.

And, of course, the raison d’etre of this latest encouragement and exploitation of human vanity in our increasingly atomized (and therefore increasingly vain) society lies 100 percent in the realm of marketing research. Promo Magazine reports:

“What’s interesting about the social space is that you can measure the different elements of performance, not only from an impression, but also from paid media and now earned media, or the sharing of what people are doing with their friends,” Alex Craddock, head of North America Marketing for Visa Inc., said. “When you look at that as a success metric, you get a good sense of how the social space can be for you. There is so much data there, and with the triangulation of these findings you actually can be very well informed about how a campaign is forming in real time.”

Consider Terracycle, the scam being run by college drop-out Tom Szaky.

Terracyle claims to be an “upcycler,” purportedly taking used products and packages and making them into supposedly “green” new products.

Of course, though you’d never know it from the fawning coverage it receives in the capitalist press, the operation doesn’t withstand the slightest scrutiny, even from the outside.

Consider the product by which Terracycle got itself off the ground — garden fertilizer sold in re-used soda bottles. The obvious two questions about this stuff? First, what happens to the empty bottles after the fertilizer is gone? Second, given that Terracycle is a “partner” with both Coca-Cola and Frito-Lay/Pepsi, isn’t Terracycle actually yet another device for pre-empting bottle bills, to say nothing of its role in preventing people from questioning the explosion of plastic drink packaging in the first place?

Meanwhile, consider the degree of green-ness of this:

What is that? It’s a pair of supposedly portable speakers for computers and mp3 players.  When used, they look like this:

Again, rather obvious questions arise:

First of all, precisely what does the product’s main eco-promise — “made with up to 80% recycled materials” — actually mean?  This piece of marketing double-talk combines both the “made with” and the “up to” escape clauses that are so familiar from mainstream corporate marketing efforts.  “Made with” is not the same as “made entirely from,” though it takes active thinking to catch the distinction.  Meanwhile, if you, dear reader, would be so kind as to post a reply to this very blog post, I will gladly send you up to a million dollars as a thank you gift.

Second, take another look at the packaging of these so-called speakers (which Terracycle telling markets not as electronics equipment but as toys for kids).  How “up to” green is this particular offering, if one counts the plastic box and cardboard casing in which it comes?  Why does Terracycle omit the packaging from its internet depictions of the product?

Finally, notice how Terracycle “upcycles” the junk food wrappers it solicits from it targeted victims.  Why does Terracycle use the wrappers as decorative coverings for its products, rather than pulverizing and blending them into their structures?  Doing the latter would certainly be greener, as it would require no primping and gluing of the wrappers.  Could the real reason, perchance, be that Terracycle’s corporate junk-food partners see the former move as a clever new way of deepening brand loyalty while also implying their products are green?

And notice, too, that Terracycle’s main targets are school children.  “Szaky says more than 60% of all American schools are collecting garbage with TerraCycle.”  Again, it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the connection between that, the supposed “upcycling” of wrappers onto the faces of Terracycle products, Terracycle’s list of corporate partners, and its true purpose and business model.

The actual rank of environmental concern in that model can be judged by reading the Wikipedia entry on Mr. Szaky.  From that, does he sound to you like a worried ecologist or just another cash-seeking con man?

Consider then, this, the announcement that neo-fascist media star Glenn Beck will be one of the featured speakers this year at Advertising Age‘s Media Evolved Conference.  The topic of this yearly professional soiree for marketing operatives is “smarter approaches to traditional media buying, the ways social media can enhance consumer engagement with content including TV, brands’ increasing opportunities to create their own media, and how to best use the proliferating platforms, channels and outlets.”

I mention this fact because Beck’s appearance at Media Evolved is far weightier evidence of the accuracy of the propaganda model than almost anything that can be gleaned from observation of broadcasts/content.  It is one thing for Beck to be featured as a provider of media content.  It is quite another, and far deeper, thing for him to be invited into the media planning stage.

Can you imagine the overclass shitstorm that would occur if Noam Chomsky or even David Barsamian or Amy Goodman were invited to discuss how the media are planned and run, rather than just what they broadcast?  It is literally unimaginable, of course, that such would ever happen, precisely because of the certainty and intensity of the ensuing shitstorm.

In terms of evidence for judging the Herman and Chomsky model, the reality that Glenn Beck is an invitee to the most boilerplate and big-time of media planning events trumps just about anything you could think of from the media-output side of the story.  Advertising Age is a 100 percent venerable, mainstream corporate capitalist enterprise, and remains a standard tool of the Fortune 500 boardroom.  Its Media Evolved Conference co-sponsors include McCann Worldwide, the world’s largest advertising agency group, and a host of other major corporate marketing-servicers.  Beck’s Media Evolved co-speakers are field marshals and top spies from a phalanx of big business pace-setters.  Would any of these operations or personages risk their access to corporate cash by associating themselves with Chomsky, Barsamian, or Goodman?  Not a chance.  But Glenn Beck?  He causes not a ripple.  QED.

Meanwhile, for those interested in media studies, this is also more evidence of what a mistake it is to follow the convention therein of focusing first and foremost on media content and advertising, rather than media planning and corporate marketing.  Important as they are, the former are mere symptoms of the latter processes, which are themselves mere symptoms of the continuing reign of corporate capital.

Recall that, despite the centrality of price-slashing to the ideal capitalist system described by Adam Smith, in practice, nobody hates price reductions more than capitalists. Explaining his 1892 decision to sell Edison Electric to the investment ring that was seeking to form the General Electric corporation, Thomas Alva Edison confided to The New York Times:

Recently, there has been a sharp rivalry between the [existing] companies, and prices have been cut so that there is little profit in the manufacture of electrical machinery for anybody. The consolidation of the companies will give the added advantage that a large concern has over a small one. It will give a larger working capital. It will do away with a competition that has become so sharp that the product of the factories has been worth little more than ordinary hardware… I do not know that there will be any increase in prices, but there should be an increase of 3 or 4 percent in the profits by the simple advantage of placing all of the interests under one management….I simply want to get as large dividends as possible from such stock as I hold.

Big, conglomerate, merger-forming, unregulated corporations (a.k.a., our ruling institutions today) were knowingly sought and obtained by frustrated capitalist investors precisely as a means of restricting price competition.

Within a few decades, the newly empowered investor-barons found that their success in this direction also made it possible to launch what we now know as marketing, a.k.a. studied managerial manipulation of the off-the-job behaviors of prospective customers, and to thereby further accelerate profit-making.

By diverting to marketing some of the steadily rising revenues made possible by constant price increases, big businesses could have their cake and eat it, too. People paid higher and higher prices, funding not only expanding returns on shareholder investments, but also the ever-expanding brainwashing effort on which those returns were increasingly premised. In essence, the new pricing power permitted corporate capitalists to collect a private tax and spend it on the marketing race, to the primary benefit of their owners’ portfolios.

I mention all this again because, in his Ad Age interview, Mr. McDonald confirms how the whole thing works.

“[W]e don’t signal pricing to competition, which is illegal and unethical,” says McDonald, in the mandatory pro forma nod to the prevailing agreement that a lack of old-fashioned price-fixing klatches somehow means co-respective pricing isn’t the norm.

So what do P&G managers do instead?

McDonald explains:

They make price increases, then “it takes competitors about a month or two to recognize you are pricing and about a month or two to decide to execute their price increase and then another six months to actually execute their price increase.”

In other words, they “don’t signal pricing to competition,” but they do make price changes then pay very close attention to whether competitors will co-operate on the hikes (and they usually do).

So, no (or at least not usually) secret meeting, but everybody knows how the system works, and very few ever buck it. Different process, same intent and same results:

P&G plans additional price hikes early next calendar year to recoup commodity costs and currency changes, but is about two-thirds of the way through price increases, he said.

Overall, P&G posted results in-line with analyst expectations, with organic sales up 4% to $21.9 billion and fully diluted net earnings per share up 1% to $1.03, as commodity costs continued to eat into margins despite price increases.

Under Bob’s leadership, P&G has grown sales by an average of nearly four percent per year over the past two years; core earnings per share an average of nearly seven percent; and adjusted free cash flow 106%. The Company has delivered these results despite significant economic headwinds, including slow to no growth in developed markets and rising commodity costs.

On the strength of these results, P&G has paid about $5.5 billion in dividends, returned over $6 billion to shareholders through the repurchase of P&G stock, and marked the 121st consecutive year that P&G has paid a dividend.

P.S. Bob also makes a highly interesting comment on the continuing polarization of American society:

“I don’t really see a dramatic change in consumer behavior,” Mr. McDonald said, compared to what consumers have been doing since 2008. Unemployed consumers continue to look for good value and sometimes trade down, he said. “But at the same time you’ve got people at the higher end of the economic pyramid doing extremely well and continuing to trade up.

In mainstream politics and media, it’s still a “middle-class” society. At the commanding heights of “the economic pyramid,” they know better.

The answer? Cutting prices almost always hurts profits, while the pricing power bestowed by an organization enjoying oligopolistic market power ordinarily permits both increased brainwashing outlays and increased profits.

Exhibit A: “Higher Prices Profit Pepsico,” a report from today’s edition of Advertising Age.

PepsiCo, the world’s largest snack-food maker, posted a 4% jump in third-quarter profits, aided by price increases on snack and beverage products around the world.

“PepsiCo has been more aggressive raising prices than they have in a long time,” said Jack Russo, an analyst with Edward Jones & Co. in St. Louis, Missouri. “All the staples companies are seeing cost pressures.”

Despite its long-standing projection of a youthful, silly, fun-loving image in its numerous marketing campaigns for its various junk food products, Pepsico is about as stolid a corporate capitalist cash engine as you can find. Its board of directors includes a Rockefeller and ye olde John Sculley.

Hence, the advancing profitability of operations like Pepsico is the main reason the overclass continues to hoard cash amid the jobless “recovery.” Indeed, such is the very heart of the reason large corporations remain the clear core of the system, despite the more publicized continuing expansion of the financial sector. As a big-time investor, you can’t beat them, in boom times or bust.  They continue to pump out the dough that ends up in third homes, private jets, and hedge funds.

And just how does Pepsico pull it all off financially, hiking both marketing spending and returns to shareholders?

According to Ad Age, Pepsico’s third-quarter sales were $17.6 billion. Its third-quarter 2011 cost of goods sold, the amount it had to pay for the raw materials and labor that went into making (as opposed to marketing) what it sold? $8.45 billion, less than half its sales revenue, says Ad Age.  (Note: Because some of the COGS costs, of course, are marketing-mandated expenses — the costs of labels, specialized packages, etc. — this comparison actually understates the degree to which basic labor exploitation funds the whole marketing endeavor.)

And they say Karl Marx was wrong…

The piece conveys more powerful evidence that advertising does indeed work. If it didn’t, why would restaurant chains fund such intricate and expensive endeavors? Schudson would have you think they are fools wasting investors’ money to justify their own jobs. If you think corporate overseers would tolerate that for a second, I’ve got a deal on a bridge for you.

The truth?

Any restaurant chain that forswears TV ads is in serious trouble.

“If you come off television, when your sales dip, it takes a long time to get them back to where they were before stopped advertising,” says Michael Branigan, vice president for marketing at Sizzler. “There are a ton of studies that show this. You lose brain share of your customers, and it is expensive to get revenues up again. If I stopped advertising, Sizzler’s revenue would be down, minimally, 10 to 15 percent for the year.”

People care less about the environment or green marketing claims than they did a few years ago, yet they’re also less likely to doubt marketers’ green claims or motives, according to the new Green Gauge Report from GfK.

The 2011 version of the study, based on surveys of more than 2,000 respondents between June 9 and July 5, found only 33% said the environment is “very serious and should be a priority for everyone” this year, down from 39% last year and 46% in 2007. At the same time, 41% of people agreed with the statement “first comes economic security, then we can worry about environmental problems,” up 13 points from 2007, according to GfK.

Despite people being less responsive to environmental ad claims, they seem to believe them more often. The Green Gauge report found 39% of people say business claims about the environment aren’t accurate, substantially lower than the 48% who believed that three years ago. And 37% of respondents this year said business and industry are fulfilling their responsibility to the environment, up 8 points from 2007.

This, of course, is music to the corporate ear:

“There’s a thawing in attitudes toward greenwashing,” said [study author Timothy Kenyon]. “There’s also a realization from consumers, given the economy, that [companies] can only do so much.”

And there’s even more excellent news:

People also increasingly get their environmental information from marketers, Mr. Kenyon said.

Things to notice here include the explicit discussion of the landscape for greenwashing.  That’s powerful evidence that, behind closed doors and despite public denials, greenwashing is indeed the ultimate, intentionally planned aim of corporate “green” marketing efforts.

Also, don’t let the obscurity of the name “GfK” fool you.  This is the biggest of big-time work:

“Headquartered in New York, GfK Custom Research North America is part of the GfK Group, the world’s fourth largest market research company. “

You can rest assured the “consumer package goods” giants are lapping up this exciting research.

Of course, as we TCTers know, marketing is a core part of the overall corporate capitalist order, and, as such, faces constant pressure to refine and extend itself.

Hence, is it any surprise that the premium on flattery is devouring more and more of the “content” (aka programming, aka “shows”) in commercial media? Content, after all, is merely secondary advertising, something that exists to attract eyeballs and eardrums to advertising/marketing (aka unintentional shopping).

Exhibit A: The new television program “Up All Night,” the plot of which is: two new, first-time parents attempt to care for their baby, with supposedly inherently hilarious results. Is it funny, or just an attempt at flattery? Judge for yourself:

Exhibit B: The new motion picture, “I Don’t Know How She Does It,” the plot of which is: a woman holds down an upper class “job,” while also trying to be a wife and mother. This one is also a load of undisguised, straight-up button-pushing. It is, in Tasha Robinson‘s apt phrase, lifestyle porn:

Such is American culture these (late) days. Hilarious, isn’t it?

Meanwhile, for those of you wondering how Hollywood movies serve as marketing vehicles, two words: product placement. “I Don’t Know How She Does It” features not one, but two Product Placement Coordinators (look under “Other Crew”). During its filming, one product placement expert described it thus:

Sarah Jessica Parker leaves her character of bad girl from New York upper class to become a London City broker. In this case she is even a mother and has to conciliate these two roles. The comedy is based on the best-seller by Allison Pearson, who will be out in February with her second novel “I think I love you”….The shootings will begin in London in January. A product placement fit for high fashion Companies, accessories, and baby products. A rare occasion for products for kids; the premises fo this movie seems to be in fact really good.

Brier writes of his time at NYU’s Gallatin School, where he loved the freedom to explore “city planning, eventually moving to education, cultural studies and landing on a fascination with media” and to work with hip professors.

Where did it all lead Mr. Brier? You guessed it: To starting a marketing consultancy specializing in coaching corporations on perfecting the art and science of commodity fetishism. Brier waxes passionate in Advertising Age:

Many…brands belong to the biggest companies in the world, and they are proven money-making machines. They manage global distribution networks and put products in millions of stores worldwide. What to post on Facebook hardly seems like one of the more difficult business decision they’ll face today. Yet, it turns out to be exactly that.

Brier’s advice?

Teach your brand to speak….[Corporate planners] have to…have to think of their channels [means of reaching their targets with "marketing stimuli"] less as CRM and more as owned media. In a nutshell, they need to [have their brands] act less like brands and more like people.

Percolate [Brier's new consultancy] helps brands identify and create content at scale. In a digital world, we believe brands can be signals. Pointing consumers to valuable information that is not necessarily about the brand directly, but speaks to the brand promise and consumer mindset.

Lovely, humane stuff, isn’t it? Thank you, Gallatin School!

BTW, Brier’s favorite part about his hero, Marshall McLuhan?

What struck me most about the stories of McLuhan was a point about his ability to keep morals out of his conversations about media.

The amorality is the message…