Archive for the 'Eyeballs and Eardrums (The Media)' Category
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!
Thursday, September 8th, 2011
The (Further) Demise of Content
Leslie Savan, TCT‘s favorite advertising critic, once wrote that, if you want to understand advertisements, one of the major principles to bear in mind is “follow the flattery.” Ego strokes are often used to build brand affection and loyalty.
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.
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2011
Facebook’s Clients
After a proper stretch of pretending otherwise in order to attract the sheep into the fold, mega-creep Mark Zuckerberg has recently been admitting what Facebook really is: “Our business is advertising.”
Now that it has the mutton piled high, the disguise is increasingly off.
The latest edition of Advertising Age, for example, reports:
Facebook [is] forming a 12-member client council that will give the social network input on advertising and marketing, it announced today at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.
An invitation-only group, the client council will consist of agency leaders as well as Facebook’s biggest global clients, said Facebook VP-Global Ad Sales Carolyn Everson during her Cannes keynote. The members will rotate yearly in order to give different companies a chance to participate and influence Facebook’s various ad offerings, such as the latest “comments” ad unit, which was created in its first collaboration with an advertising agency.
Two of the first 12 members of the inaugural council are Nick Brien, CEO of McCann Worldgroup, and Wendy Clark, Coca-Cola’s head of integrated marketing and communications. “The invites are going to go out next week and we’ll have it locked up in the next 14 days,” Ms. Everson said. The first meeting is planned for the Association of National Advertisers’ confab in October.
“What I’m really interested in is hearing the aggregated interests of other advertisers and see how we can move social-media advertising forward,” said Ms. Clark, who joined Coca-Cola in 2008 after a stint at AT&T. She also has something very particular in mind — reviewing social-media metrics in order to reach consensus on how success is measured in that space. “Comparing myself to myself is fine, but having the context of other advertisers would be great,” Ms. Clark said. “I’d like to see Facebook come out with an accepted benchmark.”
You could say Coca-Cola has earned its place on the council — a top advertiser on Facebook, the company has more than 31 million “likes” on its page.
Facebook wants to know what it can do to improve advertising on its platform by showing major clients its ad products as they are developed. “I would expect an actual dialogue where we bring our engineering team and our marketing team in and get feedback directly,” Ms. Everson said. “It’s important to get kickback from the market. I’m interested in having us solve our clients’ problems and how to help make their business more social at the core.”
“Our clients,” of course, are corporate capitalists. Facebook users? They’re the raw material.
The good news? People might be tiring of the whole banal trick.
Thursday, April 21st, 2011
Why Whites Are Over-Represented in TV Ads
In the UK, opinion leaders are currently feigning surprise and perplexity at the fact that there, just as in the USA, TV ads show too many white people. “Why? How can this be?,” wonder the writers and industry spokespeople.
If ever there were a question that was easy to answer, this, despite the media reportage suggesting otherwise, is it. There are two extremely basic and overwhelming reasons why white people are over-represented in television advertisements:
1. In societies with substantial racist histories (to say nothing of those with epic, paint-peeling racist histories like the UK and USA), whites still have way more money than non-whites, so the whites simply count more (and more often) as marketing “targets.”
2. Big business marketing is inherently conservative, inherently afraid of offending the most backwards parts of its targeted audiences. Hence, on topics like race and gender, capitalist advertising is always going to be at least a step behind the overall population, to say nothing of reason, enlightenment, and truth/justice.
Recall the self-report of Ed Vorkapich, long-time Pepsi-Cola advertising director, which I cited in the TCT book:
“You’ve got to be careful that the white guys don’t relate too much to the black girl and that the black guy doesn’t relate too much to the white girls.”
Such is the behind-the-scenes stuff of our dominant institutions.
Friday, April 15th, 2011
They Can’t Use Those Bombs…
One of the great problems with letting advertising be the foundation of mass media is that even the supposed non-fiction in the sponsored media declines to the same level as the ads.
Today, The New York Times howls that “Military forces loyal to Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, who have surrounded this city and vowed to crush its anti-Qaddafi rebellion, have been firing into residential neighborhoods with heavy weapons, including cluster bombs that have been banned by much of the world.”
Is the United States, one might wonder, a part of that “much of the world?”
Nope, though you’d never know that from the NYT article that raises the issue, because it doesn’t say.
2003-2006 Iraq
The US and UK use nearly 13,000 cluster munitions containing an estimated 1.8 to 2 million submunitions in the three weeks of major combat. A total of 63 CBU-87 bombs were dropped by US aircraft between May 1, 2003 and August 1, 2006.
Wednesday, March 16th, 2011
Sports and Corporate Capitalism
A reader asks what the TCT take on sports might be.
I tend to like what Chomsky says on this subject, on which he also says he gets the most hate mail. Basically, he argues that sports provide men with a way to exercise their minds and their senses of passion and commitment, but all in a completely irrational, diversionary form. This function is both attractive and crucial in a society where the chances for most of us to do those two things in productive, meaningful ways are small and dwindling, and also anathema to the overclass.
Of course, we also know spectator sports is a huge marketing vehicle, a way of attracting eyeballs and eardrums to involuntary shopping and brand consciousness/mind-conditioning activities.
Advertising Age, for example, has recently been fretting about the serious blow to corporate marketing that will result if there is a lockout that cancels or postpones the National Football League schedule next season. In such insider discussions, one often sees the truth all too clearly. Here, for example, are the words of one Dave Morgan, “CEO and founder of New York-based Simulmedia, a TV ad targeting company…[that] uses data-driven technology to help improve the relevance and results of TV advertising”:
Losing the NFL will put a number of TV networks and advertisers on the hot seat.
NFL games drive tens of millions of weekly viewers to game broadcasts and related coverage on CBS, Fox, NBC and ESPN and their local affiliates. Dozens of consumer marketers, with names like Budweiser, AT&T, Ford, Geico, McDonald’s and Southwest Airlines, build billions of dollars in national media plans around NFL games and their massive reach. To make matters worse, the networks themselves depend on NFL games to promote their weekday prime-time programming, upcoming specials and season premieres. In fact, program promotion is big factor in the networks’ willingness to pay premiums in their NFL broadcast deals. No NFL means a tough fall and winter for teams, fans, marketers and broadcasters.
Won’t be easy. Finding cost-effective replacements for those millions of viewers NFL games provide and the $3 billion-plus in attendant ad spending will not be easy. No matter how hard the TV networks work to create replacement programming, whether it is movies, secondary sports, minor league football or Sunday afternoon reality shows, it won’t be the NFL and it won’t deliver the enormous crossover audiences that the NFL has. If fragmentation of TV audiences was bad before, it will get a lot worse with no NFL. [Source: Advertising Age, March 15, 2011]
Such talk — “driving” people like so many steer to the slaughterhouse — is absolutely the standard language and attitude of big business marketing, which, as documented in the TCT book, is neither more nor less than application of scientific management principles to people’s off-the-job behaviors.
Preserving the reign of television-watching, which has the very great marketing advantage of being a mildly addictive habit, is always of great concern to marketers, as you can see from Mr. Morgan’s analysis. And, of course, spectator sports are a perfect fit for commercial TV, as they draw attention and passion, but not in too intense or too political a way. On this, I would suggest that the Manufacturing Consent model is useful for predicting not just which stories and perspectives make the news, but also what types of entertainment programming will and will not make it onto the air.
Finally, what about playing sports? I have mixed feelings here. Obviously, people will always play games and sports for fun, and I’m all for freedom and public facilitation of this demotic option. But, as a parent, I would suggest that, even in this somewhat better sphere, our culture is still quite crazy. People now stick kids into carefully organized and intensely competitive soccer and basketball leagues at the tenderest ages, and, if the truth be told, much of the way we run our high schools (i.e. very early starts to school for a population at the height of its need for sleep, all to make after-school sports practices more convenient) is also dictated by sports considerations.
Finally, I suppose I think the mania for sports is also a logical by-product of corporate capitalism’s comprehensive, progressive destruction of meaningful physical work. At home, we watch “American Idol” (this show ranks #1 among all programs in what marketers call “viewer engagement”) or “The Office,” and throw frozen pizzas into the oven. As we do, things like gardening and cooking and carpentry skills fade into history. In the realm of the economy, downsizing, automation, commodification, commercialism, and globalization are all making industrial labor not only more deskilled than ever, but almost as small a part of the overall opportunity structure as farming. The Fortune 500 sells the lion’s share of products, but employs a small and always shrinking share of the world’s workforce.
In a world that desperately needs to find ways to move away from capitalists’ heedless, sociocidal priorities, the prevailing life of button-pushing and screen-staring leaves people desperate for ways of at least seeing somebody else perform highly skilled tasks with passionately learned and maintained physical movements. I think sports allow us to imagine that we somehow value such things, even as we all turn to discombobulated mush, a.k.a. ideal “consumers.”
If we are lucky and smart, we might get the chance to build a new world that genuinely unlocks and rebalances life. If that happens, we’ll get a lot saner about sports.
