Archive for the 'Political Marketing' Category
Thursday, April 26th, 2012
President Coke (or is it Pepsi?)
ROFL! Unwilling and unable to suggest a single compelling reason why people should care about his re-election (“Defend the individual mandate!”), Brand Obama has apparently settled on boilerplate “consumer goods” marketing techniques this time around. The latest campaign combines celebrity endorsement and a sweepstakes:
Interestingly, while the landing site for this click-through ad conveys the impression that one must make a donation to win the grand “prize” of being admitted to the fundraising soiree at Clooney’s California mansion, the Official Contest Rules (again, Orwell couldn’t have thought this stuff up) say otherwise.
Fraud is as fraud does, down to the last detail.
Wednesday, April 11th, 2012
Fraud You Can’t Believe In
It’s kind of funny to watch the mainstream commentariat tripping over itself trying to explain the massively obvious truth that nobody sane believes Barack Obama ever stood for change of any kind.
Everyone knows what Barack Obama’s campaign slogan was in 2008. No one seems to know what it will be for 2012.
The White House has been cycling through catchphrases since announcing his reelection bid a year ago: Winning the Future, We Can’t Wait [ROFL: wait for what?], An America Built to Last, An Economy Built to Last, A Fair Shot [ROFL x2: politics as the chance to buy a lottery ticket?]. They seem to be looking for one to resonate — and the constant unveiling of new ones suggests that so far, none of them have. To communications experts, the kaleidoscope of slogans is the latest reflection of the difficulties finding and marketing a message that Obama has faced almost since his inauguration.
To date, Obama and his advisers have largely been defining themselves through contrast messaging — senior adviser David Plouffe called the GOP field a “clown show,” and Obama’s been casting of himself as the sober voice arrayed against irresponsible and hapless opponents.
[All the advisers] agree: The window for Obama to settle on a strong — and consistent — slogan is closing, no matter the continuing Republican primary campaign.
What an irritant these election shows are for the empty vessels who want to sell themselves as the system’s pitchfork catchers! As wondrous a strategy as squatting on the corporate nest is for collecting the monies that buy the ads, selling oneself as the sober voice of stasis in a time of clear popular outrage is simply hard to do.
Apparently, it’s equally difficult for the mainstream media to come within a mile of describing this eminently simple conundrum. (After all, doing so would risk irking the source of not just political but also commercial advertising dollars.) Politico, the vile website in which the above story appears, chalks the sales dilemma up as “another challenge that came with the shift from insurgent outsider to sitting president.”
Advertising Age, soliciting its readers for slogan proposals for the candibots, concurs, commenting that “Change We Can Believe In” will not work for an incumbent candidate.
Of course, neither publication acknowledges the rank illogic of their proffered explanation. What if Obama had been what he sold himself as in 2008? What if he’d passed single payer medical insurance, ended wars, stopped the slide into a police state, overturned Citzens United, imposed peace and disarmament on Israel, taken energy and environment seriously, and actually helped working class people (to say nothing of African-Americans)? Wouldn’t “Defending Change” then make an even better slogan than the one he used in his first election?
But, of course, this tube of toothpaste was always filled with snake oil, wasn’t it? Hence, the slogan problem.
Now that all politics have been completely reduced to marketing campaigns, this is no trivial matter, either. In the balance hangs the salability of the brand:
Its importance, [Obama advisor] Newman explained, shouldn’t be understated. “That [the slogan] becomes the branding of the whole campaign,” he said. “That becomes the anchor to bring together disparate voter segments. It’s the glue, if you will.”
Saturday, March 24th, 2012
M.O.Y. 2012?
You may recall that Advertising Age named Barack Obama its “Marketer of the Year” for 2008. It was a stunningly successful marketing job after all, selling an empty social climbing corporate pitchfork catcher as “Change You Can Believe In.”
Given its all-around job of quickly and thoroughly pissing on every possible kind of change its 2008 targets were hoping for, the question has been how the Zerobama squad hopes to purchase the Oval Office this time around. What would the message be this time, given the obvious exposure of the fraudulence of the 2008 “Change” fib?
The answer has begun to emerge: This time around, it will be sheer brand-name marketing: No big message, just raw flattery, message-free promotion of brainless “identity,” mere conditioned association with the brand. Just like selling any other corporate capitalist product, in other words. All it takes is money, and they’ve got piles of that.
Et voilà:
If ever there was a perfect image for the proper response to this whole scam, here it is. Lift your leg on this creep and his moribund political “party.” Just say no to corporate “politics.”
Friday, February 10th, 2012
Election 2012: Another 45% More Farcical
Television advertising, an inherently dishonest and irrational means of communication, has long been the primary venue for state and national electoral debate in the United States.
Unsurprisingly but importantly, that disastrous trend is in the process of making yet another upward leap. In the wake of the almost complete deregulation of political money after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, a Barclays Capital expert quoted in Advertising Age is projecting political advertising will this year see “a 45% increase from the 2008 presidential year.”
Most of the money goes to local TV station owners, according to Ad Age:
By the Nov. 6 election, campaigns will have spent $2.6 billion, with 85% going to local TV.
Advertising from political campaigns has become Lin TV’s [the Providence, R.I.,-based owner of 17 stations in the 12 swing states] biggest growth category, CEO Vincent L. Sadusky said at an investor conference in December.
“Fortunately for us, if you want to get elected in America, you do need to advertise,” Mr. Sadusky said. “Political has been very, very strong in the last couple of cycles and we anticipate it to be very strong going forward.”
That’s not to say that it’s unimportant to the national TV peddlers:
“There’s going to be a lot of money spent,” CBS CEO Leslie Moonves said in December. “I’m not saying that’s the best thing for America, but it’s not a bad thing for the CBS Corporation.”
CBS will receive about $230 million in political advertising this year, Mr. DiClemente estimated in the note. Without political ads, CBS’s broadcast revenue would be unchanged from a year ago, he wrote.
Ah, the free market at work…
As for this post’s title, I kid. It wouldn’t be possible for an election to be 45 percent worse than the fraud-fest of 2008. We’re far, far into asymptote territory on this front.
Friday, January 27th, 2012
The Obama Proof
Back in 2008, your humble TCT blogmaster still retained some pretty big illusions about the existence of democracy in corporate capitalist America.
Since then, events have proceeded in such a way as to push TCT to proffer a new thesis, one that TCT hereby states as a 97 percent serious, 3 percent hyperbolic claim: In corporate capitalist America, electoral politics is a mere marketing operation.
Selling is the foundational reality, market research and advertising the basis for every peep of the communication and action that comprise an “election.” Brands never change, though their respective sales trends wax and wane. Choice attaches entirely to the minutiae of style and microscopic difference that undergird almost meaningless product differentiation. The degree of democracy involved is perhaps — a big perhaps — 3 percent greater than in economic marketing of goods and services, where it is vanishingly small. In both processes, the odds of the masses changing the range of choices offered by those with the money and the power is exceedingly low. Coke or Pepsi. Jack Johnson or John Jackson.
And, just as in regular product marketing, the amount of money spent from above always increases.
Tuesday, January 17th, 2012
POTUS, aka MOY 2012
The line of the week comes from Ad Age Digital, which reports:
Puma, GE, Red Bull, Marc Jacobs, President Obama, and 200 other brands are on Instagram.
Instagram, of course, is yet another vanity-based marketing ploy on what the Robber Barons at Facebook call “the graph,” aka the data mining trick that is “the social net.”
The fact that Ad Age sees Obama, aka MOY 2008, as a mere brand is about as honest and apt a piece of information as you’ll get from the U.S. corporate media.
