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.
One TCTtradition is taking note of the deepening psycho-social illness manifested on this, so-called Black Friday.
The phenomenon is, of course, part of the corporate capitalist effort known as Christmas. As marketing strategy executive Clyde McKendrick noted in his apology for this year’s metastasis of Black Friday into Black Thanksgiving in Tuesday’s edition of Advertising Age:
Many of the traditions we hold dear as institutions in our holiday season have been basic marketing ploys to drive sales. Some of our traditions with the highest cultural capital, such as Macy’s Thanksgiving parade, are no more than events designed to draw shoppers out of their homes. Likewise, it’s well known that we have Coca-Cola to thank for Santa’s current incarnation (though the folks at White Rock Beverages say they were first) and Montgomery Ward to honor for Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer.
McKendrick’s reassuring words fairly drip with the actual sentiments and values behind the Xmas campaign:
By building Black Eve into the cultural calendar as a new Thanksgiving tradition, we are gaining another focal point in our holiday period that will act as a standalone event from Black Friday. Retailers capitalizing on this culture shift will benefit not only from an extension in selling, but in fact create a double spike in buying behavior.
Meanwhile, participation in the Black Thankgiving-Friday crime spree is an increasingly obvious IQ test. As reported by The New York Times for November 24, it unsurprisingly turns out that the thing is a giant bait-and-switch operation:
[D]espite all the ads that suggest otherwise, the lowest prices tend to come at other times of the year.
Retailers do discount smaller appliances on the Friday after Thanksgiving. “You’ll see small kitchen electronics under $20, sometimes under $10 — blenders, toasters,” he said. “But it’s low-end, cheap Chinese knockoffs that are heavily discounted — often there’s a mail-in rebate hassle that goes with it — but it’s a very, very low price.”
That is true of most of the biggest deals on that Friday, he said. Because retailers want to impress shoppers with very low prices, the quality of the discounted items can be low.
For higher-end electronics, Mr. de Grandpre’s trends show, shoppers should wait until the week after Thanksgiving.
“Black Friday is about cheap stuff at cheap prices, and I mean cheap in every connotation of the word,” Mr. de Grandpre said. Manufacturers like Dell or HP will allow their cheap laptops to be discounted via retailers on that Friday, but they will reserve markdowns through their own sites for later.
“The bottom line is, Black Friday is for the retailers to go from the red into the black,” [another expert] said. “It’s not really for people to get great deals on the most popular products.”
One minor TCT thesis is that advertisements for cellular telephones almost always depict arguments against owning cellular telephones. The “humor” in the ads is supposed to flip the argument, and, given the continuing sales of cell phones, it must succeed in doing so in many marketing-softened minds.
In any event, TCT hereby officially extends this thesis to Christmas ads, which contain increasingly bald but supposedly “funny” portrayals of rank psychosis:
Maybe I’m the crazy one, but this stuff makes me want to boycott the entire Xmas operation.
This stuff pretty much speaks for itself. In a piece titled “What Brand Marketers Want From Facebook: A Holiday Wish List,” Laura O’Shaughnessey, CEO of SocialCode, a social agency that works with Fortune 100 brands and top agencies, has posted a true gem of humanity over on Advertising Age. Here you go:
Facebook is notorious for constantly evolving its platform, both for users and advertisers.
It is about that time of year and the signs are all around: stores are filled with festive decorations in hopes of enticing early shoppers, every commercial announces the perfect gift for him or her, and the Starbucks red cups have finally made their annual appearance. Yes, it is time to pull together our holiday wish lists. But it’s is not just you and me making lists; top brand and agency marketers are dreaming of what Facebook might give them this holiday season.
Among dear Laura’s wishes:
Third-party tracking within social ads.
Agency and brand marketers are also accustomed to including their own tracking urls within display advertising. While this is possible within certain Facebook marketplace ads, whenever a brand wants to use an ad with ‘social context’ (e.g. embedded like/share/read/listen button or sponsored story ad), they forego the ability to include third party tracking.
Obviously there are great benefits to running the ads with social context. They tend to be a highly efficient way of garnering ‘likes’ or desired actions since the user can engage directly within the ad unit. These ad units are also more relevant to users since they incorporate behaviors of users’ friends and provide a positive word of mouth experience.
On the flip side, the inability to include third party tracking makes it more difficult for brands to track downstream actions of these users. Perhaps Facebook will consider allowing a hybrid that serves the dual purpose of keeping users within the Facebook platform, but allowing brands to track their other activities on the brand page.
As heart-rending as Tiny Tim, isn’t it? Who among us hasn’t shed tears over corporate capitalists’ still-limited ability to track people’s downstream actions?
Not to worry, though, friends. Facebook, Ms. O’Shaughnessey reminds us, is certainly no Scrooge to its own true constituency:
Facebook is the world’s most pervasive social network and has a constantly improving advertising platform. Although the metrics and analytics are not totally comprehensive, and not an exact replica of display advertising, the power of social ads, the incredible targeting and the reach of the platform means that marketing on Facebook should be a crucial part of every brand manager’s marketing mix. As Facebook continues to innovate, marketers will certainly get some of the capabilities they long for and will continue to get new functionality that ties into the social graph [sic + wtf? + predictable explanation] and enables the most powerful advertising online.
I’m not a huge fan of Slavoj Zizek. His stuff usually strikes me as being both scattershot and overly, self-consciously “theoretical.” But he does have his powers.
TCT heartily endorses his recent take, as reported in Harper’s, on an issue at the heart of the Occupy Wall Street movement:
Harper’s: You were critical of some of the slogans used by protesters in 2008 — “Save Main Street, Not Wall Street” for example. During Occupy Wall Street, people say, “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out.” Is there a better slogan to be had?
Zizek: The problem is that if you mobilize against the bad financial system you fall into a certain ideological trap, the fascist trap. This is the basic fascist idea: we have the truly productive strata — workers, industrial capitalists — and then we have the bad Jewish bankers who exploit them. The problem is not to fight Wall Street. The problem is, why does the system need Wall Street to function?…If Wall Street collapses, then Main Street collapses. That’s how the system works.
TCT would add that it’s also not very advisable to forget that, along with the financial sector, the supply-side bailouts included corporate capitalism’s beating heart — the automobile industry.
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.
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.
