Archive for the 'Eyeballs and Eardrums (The Media)' Category
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!
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.
