Archive for the 'Politics of Marketing' Category
Thursday, December 1st, 2011
A Very, Very Small Victory
Today, a law that prevents toys from being included in children’s meals that exceed 600 calories and lack fruit or vegetables goes into effect in the City and County of San Francisco. Pushed by liberal lobbying groups like the oxymoronically-named Corporate Responsibility International, the idea behind such ordinances is that regulating happy meal giveaways is somehow a “step forward” in the effort to end childhood obesity and type II diabetes.
The entirely predictable response by fast food marketers? Per Advertising Age:
McDonald’s, the world’s largest restaurant chain, will stop giving out Hello Kitty figurines or any other toys with its Happy Meals in San Francisco starting tomorrow because of a new city ordinance.
“A law was passed recently that means we cannot give away a free toy with our Happy Meals” at the 19 McDonald’s stores in San Francisco, [McDonald's] spokeswoman Danya Proud said in an e-mailed statement today. Parents can buy a toy for 10 cents along with a Happy Meal or Mighty Kids Meal, she said.
Wow! The revolution is upon us now, isn’t it?
But, seriously, what a mess. In the name of the patently silly idea that free toys are a major cause of the obesity and diabetes epidemic, activists have succeeded in enacting what will amount to a ten cent tax on poor people. Meanwhile, those same poor people will absolutely continue to buy happy meals, for the same old reasons, which are far larger and deeper than the mere unawareness attributed to them by the gesturing activists lobbying for addlepated regulations.
Personally, I’d wager the dime charge might actually do the very opposite of what the toy-banners thought they were accomplishing. By raising the topic of whether or not to get a toy and by associating it with a price, mightn’t the new arrangement make the toy forbidden (but not really) fruit, and hence an even better vehicle for inculcating brand loyalty?
In the process, the contortions needed to pretend that the SF happy meal law is anything but a pointless pose forces otherwise excellent people to become liars:
[McDonald's move to offer toys for a dime is] “Proof positive, and completely admitted by McDonalds, that no customer will buy a Happy Meal unless it comes with a toy,” Dr. Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University, told CBS News in an email.
Dr. Nestle, people aren’t stupid. If the toys were absent, a great many people would most certainly still buy happy meals. So, why insist the contrary? Are you trying to discredit the idea of creating a better society?
The prevalence of fast food is a symptom, not the disease.
Friday, October 7th, 2011
Logo of the Week
So, this is Advertising Week in New York City. It’s an orgy of self-congratulation, plus a rather obvious PR effort to remind the city of the importance of the brainwashing-for-profit industry. One of their goals this year is also “serving as the primary catalyst to create New York City’s first public high school dedicated to advertising and media . . . the High School for Innovation, Advertising & Media in Canarsie, Brooklyn.” What will they name this new academy? Big Brother High? Will their basketball team be the Fighting Focus Groupers?
In any event, you have to give Advertising Week’s organizers credit for one thing: They have the most apt and honest logo you’re likely to see for a while:
Sunday, July 25th, 2010
Barking Up the Wrong Trees
Given that they haven’t yet bothered to think through the basic labels and human relationships involved, it’s no surprise that “consumer” activists have a positive talent for hatching profoundly silly attempts at combating the big business marketing juggernaut.
The latest such windmill-tilt is the effort to support new regulations on advertising food to children. The New York Times reports:
Lucky Charms. Froot Loops. Cocoa Pebbles. A ConAgra frozen dinner with corn dog and fries. McDonald’s Happy Meals.
These foods might make a nutritionist cringe, but all of them have been identified by food companies as healthy choices they can advertise to children under a three-year-old initiative by the food industry to fight childhood obesity.
Now a hard-nosed effort by the federal government to forge tougher advertising standards that favor more healthful products has become stalled amid industry opposition and deep divisions among regulators.
Of course, the new rules are being written by the U.S. Congress, so their arrival is long overdue, as the assembled representatives perform their duty and let their major donors nibble away at the proposed rules.
Meanwhile, always the naivest crowd in the room, “Some advocates fear the delay could result in the measure being stripped of its toughest provisions,” observes The Times.
How long have you been asleep, Activist Van Winkle? This is what Congress does. It represents money.
At the same time, the whole thing is a blatant play-acting farce in the first place. Advertising junk food to kids, which the new regulations might possibly mildly impede but certainly not stop, explains at most 10 percent of the modern obesity epidemic. A far larger chunk (pun intended) results from rampant addiction to television and televisual “new media,” all massively and aggressively sponsored by corporate capitalist marketing. Another, also much bigger cause of obesity is cars-first transportation, without which corporate capitalism would implode.
There’s also something slippery about the gambit of trying to respond to fight all this by limiting what advertisers can say. The First Amendment is not a toy.
A real response to corporate capitalist lying and killing would involve advocating aggressively competitive public media and public enterprise. Quadruple the budgets of PBS and the NEA, and charge them with voicing the public interest, free from the need to keep private sponsors happy. Launch public, non-profit enterprises that make and sell products designed to be cheaper and better and healthier than the most harmful corporate wares. Fight for a program of radical reconstruction of the nation’s town and cities, to de-emphasize televisual addictions and cars-first travel.
These are serious, potentially meaningful answers. Hoping that Congress will stop one particular advertising claim about junk food is a tempest in a very, very small teapot. Given our moment in human history, it is simply a joke, coverage in The New York Times notwithstanding (or perhaps confirming).
Tuesday, June 8th, 2010
The Pushers’ Excuse
Crude oil is not the only pollutant gushing faster than usual into our biosphere these days.
Check out the copious flow of op-editorializing to the tune of “If BP Is Evil Then So Are We All.”
The core thesis of this familiar crapola is the claim that “we demand the oil they are forced to take these sorts of risks to get.”
This, of course, is the same excuse you get from elite war criminals and drug dealers. It’s purpose is also the same: to prevent careful thinking by spreading the blame to everybody and therefore nobody. “The people demand ___. I merely give them what they want.”
But is it anywhere close to true that “we” — meaning all of us, co-equally — have had and do have the same degree of control over the sources of our collective oil-appetite? Or have “our” corporations, working on behalf of their primary beneficiaries, seized and retained effective command over the large-scale political and economic decisions that determine the petro-intensity of modern life?
I am presently completing a book that argues that the latter is where the body is buried.
But, either way, this is a question that needs real asking and honest answers.
To instead burp out faux-thoughtful poses like “I couldn’t help but wonder how much I should hate myself, too” is to foreclose, not raise, the question, the debate, and, if it’s true that unequal wealth and social power exist, the realistic answers and remedies.
If you care about what’s going on, falling for rote, sponsored verbal gestures of self-blame is actually worse than not thinking at all.
Thursday, April 22nd, 2010
Farce Day
What if the Montgomery Improvement Association had responded to the segregation of the city’s buses by calling for an annual Transportation Day, instead of a steady campaign of direct action and movement organizing? What if SNCC had held a rally once a year, rather than launching expanding waves of lunch-counter sit-ins? What if, instead of marching, fighting, and continually and radically educating itself and the wider society, the Civil Rights Movement had launched Black Seal, a new “foundation” to certify select corporate products as minimally racist? The United States would still have Jim Crow apartheid laws.
Nonetheless, today we are supposed to “celebrate” Earth Day, and forget the fact that it is social movements, and only social movements, that have ever mattered in the effort to use politics to make large breakthroughs toward a better world.
Denis Hayes, the Earth Day founder who recommends car tires via “foundations” dedicated to the proposition that “the power of the marketplace” has any chance of being anything but a net ecological disaster, today tells The New York Times he thinks it is “tragic” rather than logical that corporations have turned Earth Day into what that august paper terms “a premier marketing platform for selling a variety of goods and services.” What did you expect, Denis, when you suggested that an annual “day” was somehow a serious attack on our overclass’s institutional dedication to planetary ecocide? Gestures are not social movements, no matter how hard one tries to gesture.
Meanwhile, at today’s Earth Day rally in New York City, those keeping track will get another chance to see that corporate capitalists are routinely pulling of feats of propaganda that would make Big Brother poop their pants in fits of jealousy. PepsiCo, the conglomerate whose core business is peddling various forms of unhealthy sugar water cased in plastic, is going to unveil its Dream Machine recycling kiosks. For each bottle shoved into one of these stations, PepsiCo promises to make “a per-bottle donation to the Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans, a business training program for disabled veterans.” The amount of that donation to such an amazing cause? Unspecified, of course. But, rest assured, it will be “an amount.” 1/1000th of one cent? That’s an amount, isn’t it? And what vet, fresh back from killing poor people for no reason, doesn’t want to go get harangued about “entrepreneurship” by PepsiCo? That’s just as good as the old G.I. Bill of the 1940s, right?
But all this isn’t the half of it. PepsiCo, the massive plastic and sugar-water pusher, is, all the while and right into the future, a long-standing major opponent of bottle bills, widely and uncontroversially known as far and away the most effective and efficient incentive to beverage container recycling. On behalf of its shareholders and corporate retailer customers, PepsiCo finds bottle bills to be “unwieldy for store customers and suppliers, and inconvenient for consumers.” In other words, bad for profits. Ergo, Pepsi and it corporate capitalist allies work the nation and world to make sure that bottle bills don’t spread from the handful of places where they already exist.
Welcome to Earth Day!
Wednesday, January 20th, 2010
All-American Moron Alert
Advertising Age reports that the reactionary, fake-Christian group Focus on the Family has purchased a 30-second spot during the 2010 Superbowl. The ad stars the brainless mega-ass Tim Tebow, pictured at left in a rare moment when he’s not running his mouth thanking Jesus for over-seeing one of his college football games.
Ad Age describes the anti-gay, anti-feminist, anti-love, anti-real-family nature of the ad:
The organization’s ad will feature college football star Tim Tebow and his mother, Pam, sharing a personal story centered on the theme of “Celebrate Family, Celebrate Life,” according to a news release from Focus on the Family.
Not only do I look forward to hating whatever NFL team gets stuck with the odious peckerwood Tebow, but I commend this ad to those interested in the competing analyses of which side of the spectrum is shut out of the corporate media, and which is not, despite its fact-free, flak-providing bleats about “the liberal media” (meaning “the leftist media”).
Ad Age, of course, relays the preposterous claim that FOTF’s “Super Bowl commercial is not polarizing and does not take an ‘anti’ stance against any issue.”
Sure. And all the other ads, for each of which which CBS collects between $5,000,000 and $5,600,000 per minute (one wonders: WWJDWFMD?), are merely there to provide information, not mind-injections, to citizens.
