Archive for the 'Eyeballs and Eardrums (The Media)' Category
Thursday, November 5th, 2009
Our Pablum-buro: One Way Corporate Marketers Censor Media
Could any information or drama the Fortune 500 defines as “family friendly” possibly address our real needs at this point in human history?
Probably not, but that doesn’t mean they won’t force their between-ads filler on us.
Thursday, October 29th, 2009
Some Good News
Turns out people aren’t as gullible as I recently reported.
This just in from Advertising Age:
CORRECTION: Both the original headline and the body of this story about Honda’s “Social Experiment” incorrectly stated that the automaker tallied 2 million fans on Facebook. Honda now has more than 250,000 fans (the one-day takeover Oct. 19 more than doubled the number of 63,083 and since then has grown.) The 2 million figure represented how many “connections” — or how many friends its fans collectively have — a very soft metric of social-media success. We were way off and we apologize for the errors.
Me, too.
Monday, October 26th, 2009
Honda “Experiment” Tests Shallowness, Vanity
Honda Motor Company is running a marketing campaign packaged as a “social experiment.” The cover story is to see how much people “love” Honda automobiles by inviting them to post personal photos and blurbs on the Facebook “social” networking site.
The truth, of course, is that what Honda is really testing is how effectively they can convert people’s petty vanity and sheer programmability into still more irrational brand loyalty.
Have people been falling into this trap?
The results thus far have blown away Mr. Peyton, who felt at the campaign’s onset that “If we got a million connections, that would be cool.” He called the push “a pretty powerful piece of advertising because people are buying into it and we aren’t giving anything away.”
Honda initially supported the site with a sprinkling of ads on Facebook. “It wasn’t a big media buy, but it got a lot of attention,” said Tom Peyton, senior manager-national advertising. Earlier this month, TV was added to the mix, with 15- and 30-second spots featuring actual owners. The commercials were created by Honda’s longtime agency, independent RPA, Santa Monica, which developed the concept. The buy, also handled by RPA, encompasses prime-time programming such as “30 Rock,” “How I Met Your Mother,” “Dancing With the Stars” and NFL football.
The campaign got a huge boost after a one-day targeted homepage takeover Oct. 19 on high-reach sites, including ESPN.com, CNN.com and SportsYahoo.com. That more than doubled the number of Facebook fans into the range of 1.7 million. (As of press time Oct. 22, the number had topped 2 million).
Footnote: As of this morning, the number of victims of this campaign is approaching 2.5 million.
Saturday, September 19th, 2009
Why No Uprising?
Answer:
Viewing of video on television, Internet and mobile devices — the Three Screens — continues to increase and has hit record levels. Nielsen’s fourth quarter A2/M2 Three Screen Report reports that the average American watches more than 151 hours of TV per month, an all-time high. They are also watching several hours of video on other devices: those who watch it on the Internet consume another 3 hours of online video per month, and those who use mobile video watch nearly 4 hours per month on mobile phones and other devices.
This un-discussed deepening addiction, a cardinal aim, requirement, and symptom of core-country corporate capitalism/market totalitarianism, also explains why most Obama voters haven’t begun to realize how massively and completely baited-and-switched they’ve been.
Thursday, August 27th, 2009
“Behavioral Guarantees”
According to Advertising Age for August 26, 2009, we’ve entered the age in which media conglomerates are selling air time to corporate advertisers via “behavioral guarantees.”
In the words of marketing research firm TRA, it’s:
Finally true accountability for TV! TRA, a media and marketing research company, has America’s largest second by second national live and time shifted TV database of 1.5 million households and the largest ever single-source database of 370,000 households that matches TV ad viewing to actual purchases of the product being advertised.
Basically, what TRA does is track what individual households watch on TV and what they then buy in stores, with an eye on the households’ exposure to specific ads. TRA then reports its findings to the broadcasters, who promise the corporate sponsors specific sales results from the ads they pay to air. If the promised buying behavior does not materialize, the ad-placing corporation gets a “make-good,” usually more advertising time for free.
And as always, this new market-totalitarian capacity is but the beginning:
‘This is where the future needs to be,’ said Donna Speciale, [media-time broker] MediaVest’s chief investment officer. ‘Our ultimate goal is to figure out how to better reach consumers and get our inventory much more targeted, not just buy the typical demographic breakout. That’s where all the testing in these different areas is heading, to get much more granular research.’
Thursday, June 4th, 2009
Pubic Hair & Market Totalitarianism
If you’ve been fortunate enough to see — one way or another — much private anatomy in recent years, you’ll be aware that we live in an age of de rigueur pubic (that’s p-u-b-i-c, not p-u-b-L-i-c) shaving. Supposedly edgy and hip rather than creepy and infantilizing, this practice is truly rampant, from what I’ve (ahem) seen.
How hip and independent is it, really, though, to shave your junk?
Not so much. Not so much at all.
Take a look at this viral marketing video from the Gillette Corporation.
Note the instructions to “make sure” to use shaving cream not soap, the very latest 5-blade razor (one wonders where this bit of the marketing race will end — 57 blades?), and, of course “moisturizer” (the substance formerly known as “lotion”). All these just happen to be products made by Gillette, so what might a rational soul make of its chummy, flattering, “hip” shaving “advice”?
The real story, of course, is that the existence of body hair has now become a great marketing vehicle for the shareholding class, complete with the standard tools of big business marketing: false promises (larger penises and more “fun” will result for those who do as they’re programmed to do by Gillette and the “viral” “culture” it is sponsoring) and threats (if you don’t use the newest Gillette Fusion razor, you might shave off your vitals).
As in so many areas, all this speaks to our howling need to make the 2010s into a new and improved 1960s.
Along the way, why not lose the shave-bot programming and the sponsored pseudo-hipsterism? Why not lose the chains of corporate babydom and cull the living, hairy, grown-up flower?
