Archive for the 'A Culture of…' Category
Saturday, February 4th, 2012
Sheryl Sandberg Sucks
The New York Times today runs a shameless butt-kiss piece on Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. Contrary to the thesis of the NYT, which is that Sandberg is somehow a new sort of feminist as well as a “self-made” (a word used twice in the story) business genius, Sandberg might actually be even more odious than either Facebook or its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, both heavyweight champeens in the field of being hard to take.
According to the story, Sandberg considers it her mission to deny the impact of social structure and political policy on women. “[I]n her view,” the Times reporter explains, women “must take responsibility for their careers and not blame men for holding them back.”
Ms. Sandberg sees herself as more than an executive at one of the hottest companies around — more, too, than someone who will soon rank among the few self-made billionaires who are women. She sees herself as a role model for women in business and technology. In speeches, she often urges women to “keep your foot on the gas pedal,” and to aim high.
And, as she engages in such trite talk about “men” and fails to mention social class or the backward state of U.S. family welfare programs, exactly how self-made is Ms. Sandberg?
According to her 2004 NYT wedding announcement, “She is a daughter of Adele and Joel Sandberg of Miami. The bride’s father, an ophthalmologist, is a partner in Eye Surgery Associates, a group practice in Hollywood, Fla.”
Well, there you have it. Aren’t those the same basic conditions facing all little girls? Daddy’s a surgeon and I’m prepping for Harvard — I refuse to slip and have to go to FSU! And baseball starts at third base, right?
And is Sandberg spending her every hour trying to turn Facebook’s billions into better services, as her creepy CEO would have you presume? Um, unless you’re a major Procter & Gamble shareholder, not quite:
Part of Ms. Sandberg’s role has been to cultivate relationships with large advertisers seeking new ways to engage with customers — particularly female ones — online. She was instrumental in signing up advertisers like Procter & Gamble. After several meetings with Facebook, Procter chose the platform for a new Secret deodorant campaign aimed at young women.
“P.& G. wants to be where the people are, and more and more people are spending their time on social sites,” says Alex Tosolini, vice president of Procter’s global e-business unit. “The purpose of our Secret campaign was to inspire women of all ages to be more fearless.”
It’s a message that sounds similar to Ms. Sandberg’s. And it bumped domestic sales of Secret deodorant by 9 percent in the first six months of the campaign and raised Secret’s market share by 5 percent from the period a year earlier.
Glory, glory hallelujah! What great times we live in!
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, December 5th, 2011
Xmas Psyop Update
The marketing platform known as Christmas is, given its obvious importance to the powers-that-be, often a season of increased honesty among the professionals who plan, implement, and track our market-totalitarian culture’s driving gears. Hence, in today’s edition of Advertising Age, reporter Natalie Zmuda asks:
Consumers claim they’re keeping a close eye on holiday budgets, so how to explain this year’s record-breaking post-Thanksgiving retail sales?
The answer, of course:
The secret is landing on the right marketing message, but it’s no simple feat. For retailers, planning for the Christmas ads just now airing kicked off months ago. Many begin assessing the season as soon as the last holiday season ends, with the heavy lifting in market research and consumer testing happening in late spring or early summer.
Social engineering, in other words.
All to the intended (for the overclass) end:
Research from Shopper Sciences, part of IPG’s Mediabrands, found that 80% of shoppers surveyed spent more than they planned to Black Friday weekend. Shoppers have been “living in a siege state of mind,” said Shopper Sciences CEO John Ross, so consumers are susceptible when they stumble on that perfect item that wasn’t on the list.
Tis the season — of induced stumbling and susceptibility!
Friday, November 25th, 2011
Black Fraud-day
One TCT tradition is taking note of the deepening psycho-social illness manifested on this, so-called Black Friday.
The phenomenon is, of course, part of the corporate capitalist effort known as Christmas. As marketing strategy executive Clyde McKendrick noted in his apology for this year’s metastasis of Black Friday into Black Thanksgiving in Tuesday’s edition of Advertising Age:
Many of the traditions we hold dear as institutions in our holiday season have been basic marketing ploys to drive sales. Some of our traditions with the highest cultural capital, such as Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, are no more than events designed to draw shoppers out of their homes. Likewise, it’s well known that we have Coca-Cola to thank for Santa’s current incarnation (though the folks at White Rock Beverages say they were first) and Montgomery Ward to honor for Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer.
McKendrick’s reassuring words fairly drip with the actual sentiments and values behind the Xmas campaign:
By building Black Eve into the cultural calendar as a new Thanksgiving tradition, we are gaining another focal point in our holiday period that will act as a standalone event from Black Friday. Retailers capitalizing on this culture shift will benefit not only from an extension in selling, but in fact create a double spike in buying behavior.
Meanwhile, participation in the Black Thankgiving-Friday crime spree is an increasingly obvious IQ test. As reported by The New York Times for November 24, it unsurprisingly turns out that the thing is a giant bait-and-switch operation:
[D]espite all the ads that suggest otherwise, the lowest prices tend to come at other times of the year.
Retailers do discount smaller appliances on the Friday after Thanksgiving. “You’ll see small kitchen electronics under $20, sometimes under $10 — blenders, toasters,” he said. “But it’s low-end, cheap Chinese knockoffs that are heavily discounted — often there’s a mail-in rebate hassle that goes with it — but it’s a very, very low price.”
That is true of most of the biggest deals on that Friday, he said. Because retailers want to impress shoppers with very low prices, the quality of the discounted items can be low.
For higher-end electronics, Mr. de Grandpre’s trends show, shoppers should wait until the week after Thanksgiving.
“Black Friday is about cheap stuff at cheap prices, and I mean cheap in every connotation of the word,” Mr. de Grandpre said. Manufacturers like Dell or HP will allow their cheap laptops to be discounted via retailers on that Friday, but they will reserve markdowns through their own sites for later.
“The bottom line is, Black Friday is for the retailers to go from the red into the black,” [another expert] said. “It’s not really for people to get great deals on the most popular products.”
Occupy Xmas, anybody?
Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011
Xmas as Mental Illness
One minor TCT thesis is that advertisements for cellular telephones almost always depict arguments against owning cellular telephones. The “humor” in the ads is supposed to flip the argument, and, given the continuing sales of cell phones, it must succeed in doing so in many marketing-softened minds.
In any event, TCT hereby officially extends this thesis to Christmas ads, which contain increasingly bald but supposedly “funny” portrayals of rank psychosis:
Maybe I’m the crazy one, but this stuff makes me want to boycott the entire Xmas operation.
Tuesday, November 8th, 2011
Visa’s Fools
“Follow the flattery.” That is former Village Voice ad critic Leslie Savan’s sage counsel to would-be critics of advertising. As Savan knows, ego-stroking is one of the core tactics of big businesses’ efforts to manipulate our off-the-job behaviors.
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.”
