Archive for the 'Political Marketing' Category
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.
Tuesday, December 20th, 2011
Political Marketing Update
“Politics,” John Dewey once observed of the normal state of corporate capitalism, “is the shadow cast on society by big business.” As this normalcy has grown and the methods of big business marketing have been increasingly applied to selecting and selling candidates, Dewey’s shadow metaphor has seemed less and less adequate. Politics is now the scientific management of society’s macro-choices by big business.
For those interested in this topic, check out this new report from the Sunlight Foundation. Its main finding:
If you think wealth is concentrated in the United States, just wait till you look at the data on campaign spending. In the 2010 election cycle, 26,783 individuals (or slightly less than one in ten thousand Americans) each contributed more than $10,000 to federal political campaigns. Combined, these donors spent $774 million. That’s 24.3% of the total from individuals to politicians, parties, PACs, and independent expenditure groups.
For those still laboring under the illusion that the Democratic Party is somehow an exception to the rule of capital, the report shows that:
Over time, the share of all individual campaign contributions coming from The One Percent of the One Percent has increased for both parties, increasing from 17.8% in 1990 to 32.1% in the 2010 election cycle. Consistently, Democrats have been slightly more reliant on The One Percent of the One Percent than Republicans – relying on The One Percent of the One Percent for, on average, about three percentage points more of their itemized campaign receipts.
TCT would suggest that aspiring progressives and radicals can save themselves a great deal of precious energy by keeping this fundamental reality in mind.
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!
Monday, November 1st, 2010
Electile Dysfunction 2010
If you’ve subjected yourself to television in the United States within the last several months, you already know this. But it bears quoting, if only to create a record of the hurtling, heedless decline of this market-totalitarian society. From Advertising Age for November 1, 2010:
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Another election cycle, another year of bitter partisan bickering [ed: exclusively over cynical claims and phony distinctions], another record-breaking mountain of cash spent on political advertising — all of which add up to tight inventory for local TV affiliates. According to Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group, ad spending this season will top $3 billion. Borrell Associates has predicted spending will get as high as $4.2 billion this year.
We’ve come to expect steadily increasing ad outlays in political election cycles, but this year is different.
“I’ve been doing this for 20 years and I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Evan Tracey, president of Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.
Aside from issues of anti-incumbency fervor and Tea Party madness, “the big difference in this election is the Citizens United impact,” he said, but not necessarily because major corporations are funneling more cash into the system. Rather, last spring’s Supreme Court ruling that upended many of the former restrictions on political advertising has given political ad groups more time to spend, and increased fundraising firepower.
Gone are the rules barring such advertising 60 days out from an election, meaning two full months of more spending for [groups with huge amounts of cash].
Here is another example of why ceding the mass media environment to “the private sector” is poison to democracy and society. How much do national and local media outlets love this trend? As “the electoral process” asymptotically approaches complete decline into Coke versus Pepsi land, as welfare-state-hating candibot Tweedledum attacks ashamed, pseudo-liberal candibot Tweedledee for cutting Medicare while candibot Tweedledee is busy crowing about giving “entrepreneurs” more tax cuts, and as real problems become ever more undiscussable, both the cash register and the wall of sponsored hooey ring louder and louder.
Orwell and Huxley would be out of work these days. Dystopian fiction has little left to invent.
Saturday, October 9th, 2010
It Only Gets Worse
I have reluctantly concluded that voting for candidates* has become meaningless in the market totalitarian, one-party United States. The equivalence and mutual venality of the two brands comprising the reigning Business Party duopoly is now complete, as is their eager “bi-partisan” participation in the surrender of all political discourse to the inherently irrational form of television advertising.
And the amount of money flowing into the whole sham is, of course, as always, setting new records. All without a single, solitary policy matter seriously at stake from either “side.”
Inevitably and intentionally, meanwhile, what passes for campaigning now is corporate television saturated with the most cynical, dishonest, and insubstantial bullshit blips you could imagine.
As Republicans run Orwellian ads combining supply-side government bashing with feigned upset at cuts to Medicare, here is the stuff of Democratic Congressbots’ “politics”:
“I’m (fill in the name), and I’m working in Congress so people with good ideas can grow and expand [interesting contrast here!] their businesses. That’s why** the tax breaks I passed help entrepreneurs create high tech jobs.”
That’s not made up: watch Wu’s Woo. Like I say, Orwell couldn’t make this stuff up.
SMBIVA, for realz.
*Ballot measures, despite their own extreme perversion and vulnerability by the money-and-TV electoral system, retain some potential democratic meaning. I’m certainly voting for this one, for example.
**The Congressbot here manages to fuse supply-side cant with the claim that supply-side tax cuts are effective because the Congressbot “worked in Congress” for them.
