Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009
Items from the Ad Age Annual
Advertising Age has just published its annual review of the basic size and scope of the advertising industry in the year 2009. As always, it includes some (though certainly not full) information about the size and scope of big business marketing, the wider managerial discipline of which advertising is but a part.
Some key pieces of information from this December 28, 2009 issue:
→Ad Age labels the economic conditions of the past year or so “the worst recession of your life,” and pronounces that “it is over.” (See cover at left.)
From being sick and watching lots of TV this past week, I can assure you that this “it is over” mantra is now de rigeuer in corporate communications. We shall see whether that’s accurate, or a rather major case of whistling in the graveyard.
→”Ad spending in 2009 suffered its sharpest drop since the Great Depression: -12.9%. This recession also marked the first time since the 1930s that U.S. ad spending declined for two consecutive years.”
For what it’s worth, much of this historic decline reflected what Ad Age calls “a freefall in local advertising” due mostly to the decline of automobile dealership advertising. This speaks to the continuing centrality of the auto-industrial complex within the corporate capitalist order.
→2009 saw “the first decline [in the overall revenue of the Top 100 media corporations] since Ad Age began ranking media firms in 1981.”
This fact is very powerful evidence of the ever-increasing penetration of commercial image-projection within everyday life in the United States. No wonder TV addiction continues to worsen, despite the appalling awfulness, narrowness, and fourth-rate derivateness of the vast majority of commercial-media content. (Spongebob, “Squid on Strike,” being a major exception!)
→Overall, marketing continues to grow faster (and decline later and less) than its advertising sub-component. Ad Age reports that, while ad agency revenues shrank by 9.7 percent in 2009, those of “marketing services” firms fell by only 2.4 percent.
→Jobs in ad agencies are subject to the usual corporate capitalist logic: While ad agency revenues fell by 9.7 percent in 2009, ad agency employment shrank by 14%!
Can you say “Investors first, last, and always!”?
→In 2009, employment in “marketing consulting” and public relations was 202,200, while it was only 161,500 in advertising agencies.
Again, this confirms that marketing tends to grow faster than advertising, which itself tends to grow faster than the overall economy.
→For 2009, Ad Age estimates total U.S. advertising spending by the Top 100 advertisers was $102.6 billion. That is more than two-thirds of total ad spending in the U.S., which Ad Age pegs at just under $150 billion.
Monday, December 14th, 2009
A TCT Non-News Update
And on Monday night, Democratic senators emerged from a tense 90-minute closed-door session and suggested that they were on the verge of bowing to Mr. Lieberman’s main demands: that they scrap a plan to let people buy into Medicare beginning at age 55, and scotch even a fallback version of a new government-run health insurance plan, or public option.
ROFLMAO x a million. Bye, bye, liberalism.
Tuesday, December 8th, 2009
The “Up To” Claim
In a book presciently titled Business Civilization in Decline, the late Robert L. Heilbroner made this rather crucial point:
At a business forum, I was once brash enough to say that I thought the main cultural impact of television advertising was to teach children that grown-ups told lies for money. How strong, deep, or sustaining can be the values of a civilization that generates a ceaseless flow of half-truths and careful deceptions?
Under corporate capitalist normalcy, the lies multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit blush.
One noteworthy lie is the now-rampant use of the phrase “up to” in advertising claims. Once you stop to notice it, you’ll see and hear this howler everywhere.
One particularly egregious case of the “up to” claim is here:
Not only has Michelin extended from humans to animals its long-running reliance on using death threats as a sales tactic (this extension to critters probably being done after a focus group suggested Michelin could get kids to ask their parents to buy Michelins to save the bunnies), but the “up to” claim in this ad is a double-whammy. Not only is it an “up to” claim, but it also doesn’t tell you the context for the “up to” claim!
As Ad Freak explains:
The Psyop-animated [dig that name!] spot says Michelin tires stop up to 14 feet shorter than those of the competition. (“At what speed?” you might ask, but get no answer.)
So, Michelin takes two scoops at once from the barrel of statistical deceptions.
Michelin’s products are definitely worth up to a certain price…
Saturday, March 14th, 2009
Cultural Consequences
Since they lost the ability to appeal to racism, rightists have appealed to culture to explain why blatant unfairness isn’t really unfair.
Now, to be sure, the concept of culture they use is hardly different than the old racial saws: When you press a reactionary for his/her definition of “culture,” it turns out to be “the way people are,” i.e., the allegedly native, pre-social qualities of specific groups.
This, though, doesn’t mean that there isn’t a cultural dimension to human affairs. People do absorb sticky habits from extended collective experiences, and those habits can and do turn around and affect what people do next.
Thursday, the Pew Charitable Trust released a study that provides a paint-peeling proof of the real power of accumulated experience. In “Findings from a National Survey & Focus Groups on Economic Mobility,” Pew reported that, despite the times, ordinary people in the United States continue to mis-frame and mis-understand their chances for “economic mobility”:
Nearly eight in ten (79 percent) believe it is still possible for people to get ahead in the current economy. This remains true even among lower-income, less-educated and unemployed Americans. Such consensus is striking given that a near-unanimous 94 percent of Americans describe the current economic condition of the country negatively.
Americans remain optimistic about the future—a 72 percent majority believes their economic circumstances will be better in the next ten years. This optimism crosses party lines and demographic groups. African Americans are the most optimistic (85 percent) compared to whites and Hispanics (71 percent and 77 percent, respectively).
Seventy-four percent of Americans believe they have at least some control over their own economic situation, while only 43 percent think that other people are in control. By a 71 to 21 percent margin, Americans believe that personal attributes, like hard work and drive, are more important to economic mobility than external conditions, like the economy and economic circumstances growing up.
Personal attributes such as poor life choices and too much debt were the top explanations given for downward mobility.
Although previous research by the Economic Mobility Project has found considerable differences in economic mobility by race and gender, respondents ascribed relatively little importance to their impact on mobility (15 percent and 16 percent, respectively). Further, the Economic Mobility Project’s research found that there is a strong relationship between parents’ income and children’s adult income. However, coming from a wealthy family was among the least important factors that respondents cited (28 percent).
By a 71 to 21 percent margin, Americans believe it is more important to give people a fair chance to succeed than it is to reduce inequality in this country. Each demographic subgroup, including those at the lowest end of the economic spectrum, concurs with the majority on this issue.
It’s no surprise, of course, that this familiar ideological package still holds sway. After all, this is the core topic — the dynamics of class inside the domestic “homeland” — on which the commoners simply must remain addled, in this, the flagship nation of market totalitarianism, the most heavily indoctrinated, commercialism-and-TV-penetrated society in human history.
How many times, even in recent months, have you heard the basic facts about class?
The deep imperatives and limits of corporate capitalism?
Now compare those zeroes to the number of times you’ve experienced the “anything is possible in America” diversion?
It’s still no contest out there, folks…
Monday, January 12th, 2009
More Than A Third of US Energy Spent on Transportation
This chart from the 2009 Statistical Abstract of the United States shows that 28.6 percent of U.S.energy use happens in transportation. That figure, of course, includes only the fuels we burn while operating our transportation equipment.
What about the energy it takes to manufacture and maintain both that equipment and the spaces and surfaces over which it gets operated?
That further energy burn has to be counted against transportation, too. Undoubtedly, some serious chunk of the 31.8 percent of total annual energy use that gets spent in what remains of the U.S. industrial sector goes into making and servicing cars and roads.
Hence, it is very safe to say we are now spending well over a third of our total energy use — which is itself over a fifth of total world energy use, and double the per capita amount spent in all other OECD countries except Canada — on transportation alone.
And, of course, automobiles account for the lion’s share of that.
If this arrangement isn’t unsustainable, nothing is.
Wednesday, December 10th, 2008
The Higher-Ed Catch-22
Chris Hedges sometimes misses, but he often also rings the bell.
He has nailed it on the topic of what you get at the nation’s elite colleges, along with your entitlement to be first hired, last fired:
The nation’s elite universities disdain honest intellectual inquiry, which is by its nature distrustful of authority, fiercely independent and often subversive. They organize learning around minutely specialized disciplines, narrow answers and rigid structures that are designed to produce certain answers. The established corporate hierarchies these institutions service — economic, political and social — come with clear parameters, such as the primacy of an unfettered free market, and with a highly specialized vocabulary. This vocabulary, a sign of the “specialist” and of course the elitist, thwarts universal understanding. It keeps the uninitiated from asking unpleasant questions. It destroys the search for the common good. It dices disciplines, faculty, students and finally experts into tiny, specialized fragments. It allows students and faculty to retreat into these self-imposed fiefdoms and neglect the most pressing moral, political and cultural questions. Those who defy the system—people like Ralph Nader—are branded as irrational and irrelevant. These elite universities have banished self-criticism. They refuse to question a self-justifying system. Organization, technology, self-advancement and information systems are the only things that matter.
Alas, I can attest that the nation’s second-tier colleges — now tellingly rebranded, one and all, as “universities” — are peopled with managers and gatekeepers steeped in the elite disease. As a result, they devote their core efforts to replicating rather than transcending the sickness. Despite the times, this socially suicidal squandering of the most precious resources shows no sign of changing.
