Archive for the 'Private-Sector Boondoggles' Category
Monday, May 7th, 2012
Age of Wonders
Good news, fellow Earthicans: Our heroic epoch’s leading minds shall never cease their valiant, world-historic labors to solve the great challenges of the perilous times. According to the latest Advertising Age:
Few people would suspect that what’s inside an unmarked building some 30 miles north of New York could change __(a)__, even the entire __(b)__. But that’s what __(c)__’s ambitious, high-energy __(d)__ are promising.
This unassuming office park houses the __(e)__ Lab, and inside are the results of months of intense research. __(f)__ have been working to chart a new course for a __(g)__ that has endured __(h)__, just behind __(i)__.
Over several weeks early this year, Brad Jakeman, president-__(j)__ officer, has walked key __(k)__ constituents around the lab, talking about ideas and showing off mock-ups of new __(l)__ machines, samples of __(m)__ and new __(n)__ concepts. It’s a world where __(o)__ specifically — and the __(p)__ generally — is __(q)__ again.
He insists it’s not a pipe dream.
Answer key:
(a) = the way consumers view a soda brand
(b) = cola category
(c) = Pepsi
(d) = marketers
(e) = Beverage
(f) = Pepsi execs
(g) = brand
(h) = an embarrassing slip to the No. 3 soda
(i) = Diet Coke
(j) = global enjoyment and chief creative
(k) = Pepsi
(l) = new vending and fountain
(m) = licensed products
(n) = marketing
(o) = Pepsi
(p) = cola category
(q) = cool
And some dare question the entrepreneurial system!
Monday, December 5th, 2011
Idea: #Occupy Post Office
The Occupy movement is drifting, trying to figure where to camp next. Meanwhile, the United States Postal Service, despite being all but mandated in the purportedly perfect and holy U.S. Constitution, is being further starved and strangled, at the cost of another 28,000 decent jobs next year alone.
Why not put 2 and 2 together, and demand that the United States not only stop the euthanasia, but reverse course and develop a robust, modernized postal system?
We know the USPS used to be permitted to open and maintain savings accounts, and that national postal services still do so in other nation-states.
We might also observe that the reason everybody states for tolerating the further erosion of the USPS — the rise of email, fax, SMS/text, and internet messaging, and the attending decline in paper-based letters and volumes — is merely a new form of the human process the Post Office was intended to encourage. Why permit the overclass to enjoy making the first half of the point without pressing them on the second? Why not fuse reason and radicalism, on a topic that few could dispute is of deepest importance?
So, Occupiers, why not occupy Post Offices and insist that the USPS be reinvigorated and launched into the business of building and maintaining a modern communications infrastructure, as well as maintaining some appropriate amount of snail-mail delivery? Why not use the USPS to compete with the corporate squatters who are now allowed to suppress public enterprise while sucking money-for-nothing from the patchy, over-priced, for-profit, advertising-intensive, second-rate telecom system in this country? Why not insist that the Postal Service build a modern, universally-available national internet, with lower prices, minimal marketing overlay, and no place for payouts to private investors? Why not out-compete the cell phone oligopolies and their pathetic but hugely expensive war over meaningless market shares? Why not insist that junk mail and corporate marketers pay first-class or even first-class-plus rates to use the public’s physical mail system?
While we’re at it, in our moment of deserved but dangerous bankster bashing, why not also press to restore the banking function to the Post Office? A 2% savings account sounds pretty good right about now, doesn’t it? And the deposits could be used to finance the USPS’s modernization and universalization of the means of citizen-to-citizen communication.
Why not insist on preserving and expanding a major public enterprise that provides decent jobs to people who do honorable, vital tasks? Why not stick it to the Man — and in some vital organs, for a change?
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.
Tuesday, April 5th, 2011
Movies as Car Ads
What did the U.S. public get in return for its second bailout of the Chrysler Corporation?
Product placement of the most ecologically unconscionable transportation products you can imagine in movies for militant meatheads.
Talk about a visual museum of a dying imperial culture…
Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
The Basis of “Private”/”Free” Enterprise
History shows that, stunning as the thought is, state legislatures in the USA are more, not less, dominated by business lobbying than is the federal government. And that dominance is certainly even greater in the South, where white people remain staggering deluded about themselves and the realities of their society and world.
So, it’s really not very surprising that North Carolina legislators are presently strangling public, not-for-profit provision of internet services. Clearly, the reason is that such services are a mortal threat to corporate revenue streams. The simple fact is that telecommunications services can be more efficiently, effectively, and cheaply provided by the public than by capitalists.
So, the North Carolina legislature is simply going to pass a law that artificially imposes all the irrationalities — and more — of the private sector on the public sector.
Remember this the next time you see some wanker talking about the supposed naturalness and glory of “private enterprise.”
Monday, February 21st, 2011
Wealth Secrets: Warren Buffett’s Public Subsidy
The Province of British Columbia provides its residents the ability to buy public, not-for-profit automobile insurance.
In the United States, where public insurance is more aggressively opposed by the overclass, publicly provided automotive coverage is entirely unavailable. Consequently, the insurance is inferior and the premiums higher. And the record profits of U.S. insurance companies, which Advertising Age reports “reached $26.7 billion in the first nine months of 2010″ — where do those go?
Largely to folks like Warren Buffett, whose Berkshire Hathaway empire owns Geico.
The basis for all those private-sector profits? Sheer waste: To promote brand awareness, Geico and its “competitors” engage in saturation advertising of their private monopoly-protected inferior product. According to Ad Age, advertising expenditure by insurers more than doubled between 2000 and 2009.
The overall sales strategy in pure Pavlov. With few differences between companies’ policies and no competition from the public sector, repetition-implanted name recall is everything:
[T]he average shopper can name just four insurance brands off the top of their head, according to J.D. Power. And the way to get on that list is to advertise — all the time. “There’s enormous overlap between the companies that advertise a lot and the companies that are growing faster,” Mr. Shields said. “It seems very much to work.” (Ad Age, February 21, 2011)
Such are the glorious “efficiencies” of capitalism.
