Archive for the 'Eyeballs and Eardrums (The Media)' Category
Friday, January 20th, 2012
New Depths of Terrible
So, The Middle is a television program on the Disney Corporation’s ABC Network. As the series’ title screams, it is as blatant a knock-off of another program, namely Malcolm in the Middle, as you could ever find in any medium, with all the usual steps down, including a huge drop-off in acting and writing talent (not that Malcolm in the Middle was ever anything wonderful itself). Obviously, the market-measurers at Disney/ABC simply noticed that the formula — ironic, navel-gazing self-pity and apolitical class resentment — still had some legs.
I mention this utterly turdy show because it just recently stepped to a new low in the multiply burned-over and reconstructed capitalist Potemkin Village that is American television. This week, The Middle aired an entire episode that was an undisguised, ham-fisted commercial for the Volkswagen Passat.
The set-up, shown in this clip, is as terrible and stupid as everything else about this series and this episode. The premise is that the main characters’ neighbors are away doing something fun, but somehow forgot to park their brand new Volkswagen Passat in their garage, so call as ask the main characters to move it in for them. This, of course, launches a series of scenes in which the main characters praise the various wonders of the Passat.
That’s the thing about commercial TV. It always gets worse, despite (and because of) all the money.
Monday, November 21st, 2011
Tis the Season 2011
This stuff pretty much speaks for itself. In a piece titled “What Brand Marketers Want From Facebook: A Holiday Wish List,” Laura O’Shaughnessey, CEO of SocialCode, a social agency that works with Fortune 100 brands and top agencies, has posted a true gem of humanity over on Advertising Age. Here you go:
Facebook is notorious for constantly evolving its platform, both for users and advertisers.
It is about that time of year and the signs are all around: stores are filled with festive decorations in hopes of enticing early shoppers, every commercial announces the perfect gift for him or her, and the Starbucks red cups have finally made their annual appearance. Yes, it is time to pull together our holiday wish lists. But it’s is not just you and me making lists; top brand and agency marketers are dreaming of what Facebook might give them this holiday season.
Among dear Laura’s wishes:
Third-party tracking within social ads.
Agency and brand marketers are also accustomed to including their own tracking urls within display advertising. While this is possible within certain Facebook marketplace ads, whenever a brand wants to use an ad with ‘social context’ (e.g. embedded like/share/read/listen button or sponsored story ad), they forego the ability to include third party tracking.
Obviously there are great benefits to running the ads with social context. They tend to be a highly efficient way of garnering ‘likes’ or desired actions since the user can engage directly within the ad unit. These ad units are also more relevant to users since they incorporate behaviors of users’ friends and provide a positive word of mouth experience.
On the flip side, the inability to include third party tracking makes it more difficult for brands to track downstream actions of these users. Perhaps Facebook will consider allowing a hybrid that serves the dual purpose of keeping users within the Facebook platform, but allowing brands to track their other activities on the brand page.
As heart-rending as Tiny Tim, isn’t it? Who among us hasn’t shed tears over corporate capitalists’ still-limited ability to track people’s downstream actions?
Not to worry, though, friends. Facebook, Ms. O’Shaughnessey reminds us, is certainly no Scrooge to its own true constituency:
Facebook is the world’s most pervasive social network and has a constantly improving advertising platform. Although the metrics and analytics are not totally comprehensive, and not an exact replica of display advertising, the power of social ads, the incredible targeting and the reach of the platform means that marketing on Facebook should be a crucial part of every brand manager’s marketing mix. As Facebook continues to innovate, marketers will certainly get some of the capabilities they long for and will continue to get new functionality that ties into the social graph [sic + wtf? + predictable explanation] and enables the most powerful advertising online.
Thursday, November 10th, 2011
Internet as Fief
In today’s Advertising Age, Patrick Moorhead, senior VP, group management director, mobile platforms for Draftfcb Chicago, makes an apt and important point about how the corporation-dominated internet works:
We live in a kind of digital feudal economy these days. We live on land we don’t own, and we provide the masters of the realm (Facebook, Google, etc.) with unlimited free access to our data and behavior, which they monetize for billions of dollars. We get to keep our little plots of digital land for free and are otherwise pretty much at the whim of the feudal masters.
Of course, the masters are actually corporate capitalists, and the corporate capitalists at Facebook and Google are, as their founders now admit, 100 percent in the advertising business, meaning their product is both harvesting data and delivering eyeballs, eardrums, and mindshares to other corporate capitalists, who use those products to plan and execute marketing campaigns.
Nonetheless, the analogy to feudalism is apt. Surrendering corvée to exploiting overlords is the price of admission to almost all internet activities in the United States, including the basic search engine services mediated by Google.
Of course, there is no technical reason why the internet could not include first-class, not-for-profit, data-secure search engines and other services. It’s just that the overclass won’t permit such possibilities to be discussed, let alone implemented.
Thursday, November 3rd, 2011
Brand Safety
The besieged swath of the internet that facilitates democratic communication has forced corporate marketers to start speaking more openly about something that’s always been at the heart of big businesses’ media sponsorship: brand safety.
Here is one insider’s explanation of brand safety:
With the advent of contextual display advertising [on the internet], a host of new advertising opportunities opened up for marketers across every industry. Whether contextualization is done at the site level (i.e. ESPN.com is about sports) or at the page level (i.e. automotive content on CNN.com), the ability to target ads around content—in addition to demographic and behavioral profiles—is pretty powerful stuff. But with these big opportunities comes an equal amount of risk. Imagine an automotive ad next to a news story about a horrific car crash or an ad for a vacation package next to tsunami news coverage of the same destination. We see it in contextual search as well as display. It’s enough to make any brand marketer anxious about any sort of online advertising.
A “brand-safe” environment, of course, is one in which the placer of the advertisement doesn’t have to worry about such horrific outcomes.
Firms like LucidMedia now provide their corporate clients the following services:
RESTON, Va.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–LucidMedia, a leading online advertising demand-side platform (DSP), today announced that it has deployed the industry’s first preemptive brand safety capabilities, enabling advertisers and agencies to detect and anticipate inappropriate content on a real-time basis and in advance of purchasing media for display advertising campaigns. The preemptive brand protection capabilities have been proven throughout a decade of research and development with the company’s patented ClickSense contextual advertising technology.
“Preemptive protection for brand advertisers is hard to do, but we believe it’s absolutely critical for advertisers and agencies to have this capability, especially for traditional big brands to more fully trust and embrace online advertising while increasing efficiency.”
LucidMedia’s preemptive brand protection capabilities differ significantly from “traditional” post-campaign brand safety analysis by using the company’s patented technology to pre-screen online advertising inventory. This involves tens of thousands of designated categories for detecting impression content with potentially objectionable concepts. Each advertiser can set criteria, or sensitivity levels, around specific categories ranging from adult entertainment to alcohol, drugs, war, hate, profanity and thousands of others. LucidMedia’s technology uses proprietary content markers to detect inappropriate impressions in advance that an advertiser may want to block partially or across the board based on their sensitivity levels and specific needs. Using LucidMedia DSP, agencies and advertisers can very quickly determine if a potential page is safe based on the advertisers’ criteria and sensitivity levels.
As they work to secure ad environments, the new brand safety firms think in terms not just of preemption, but also sanitization:
Real brand safety, meaning a demonstrably safe environment for brand advertisers to promote their message online, comes from sanitizing the ad space before the ad is served. Of course pre-impression analysis for relevance, performance and safety is very difficult to do so it’s the least prevalent form out there. Evaluating billions of impressions a day for relevance takes a robust platform and deep integration with all of the real-time bid aggregation points. But it pays huge dividends in both safety and efficiency by guaranteeing quality impressions and eliminating the need for pass-backs. With truly preemptive brand safety you only buy what is safe with no waste in the equation.
All this, of course, has always been a central part of corporate media sponsorship. Yet, prior to the opening of the democratic band of the internet, its discussion was mostly confined to closed-door interpersonal interactions between sponsors and broadcasters.
Now, the heightened “risk” embodied in the existence of a realm of unrestricted, non-commercial media communication compels big business marketers to tip their hand more publicly than before about the pre-conditions for sponsorships and ad placement.
It isn’t hard to reckon the impact on the freedom and quality of information of the long and continuing history of overclass efforts at preemptive brand safety and media sanitization.
Monday, October 31st, 2011
Exhibit G
TCT readers are aware of the Herman/Chomsky “propaganda model” theory of corporate capitalist media operation. As such, they are also aware of the special importance of parallel cases for testing said explanation.
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.
Thursday, September 15th, 2011
Foxes Blame Farmer for Henhouse Massacre
So, the CBS Evening News has been running a series of interviews with important figures it holds, in its unwavering commitment to objective journalism, to have special insight and ability to diagnose what’s wrong with the U.S. economy. Who are these figures, to whom we are supposed to defer? You guessed it: Corporate CEOs!
Take a look at this clip of Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz:
Schultz acknowledges that capitalists are hoarding cash. Why are they doing that, according to him? “The only reason is…the anxiety and uncertainty that exists about the political system.”
One could certainly ask CBS why a billionaire who started a coffee shop and holds that highest and most relevant of intellectual credentials – a 1975 bachelor’s degree in Communications from Northern Michigan University – gets to say anything on national TV about what ails the political economy in 2011.
Anyhow, let’s instead change the characters here, shall we? Let’s imagine that foxes have been devouring hens from the henhouse on Farmer Smith’s farm.
CBS: Mr. Fox and Farmer Smith, why are there so few hens in the henhouse these days? How do we rebuild the population in there? Mr. Fox, since you invented farming, let’s start with you. What the problem out there?
Fox: Well, we all know how delicious hens are [belches and picks teeth], don’t we? The one and only reason they are dwindling has to do with how Farmer Smith is paying for the tractor. Will he use cash? His credit card? How can we foxes know what to do next, when we have such a crisis of confidence about that tractor payment?
Farmer Smith: Some might say I should put a door on the henhouse and start shooting foxes. But everybody knows foxes are the engine of any productive farm, so we must actually open the windows on the henhouse, too. Meanwhile, I’ll be meeting with my neighbor farmers to consider how we should pay off our tractors. Soon, we’ll all be up to our elbows in chickens!
