Friday, February 10th, 2012
Television advertising, an inherently dishonest and irrational means of communication, has long been the primary venue for state and national electoral debate in the United States.
Unsurprisingly but importantly, that disastrous trend is in the process of making yet another upward leap. In the wake of the almost complete deregulation of political money after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, a Barclays Capital expert quoted in Advertising Age is projecting political advertising will this year see “a 45% increase from the 2008 presidential year.”
Most of the money goes to local TV station owners, according to Ad Age:
By the Nov. 6 election, campaigns will have spent $2.6 billion, with 85% going to local TV.
Advertising from political campaigns has become Lin TV’s [the Providence, R.I.,-based owner of 17 stations in the 12 swing states] biggest growth category, CEO Vincent L. Sadusky said at an investor conference in December.
“Fortunately for us, if you want to get elected in America, you do need to advertise,” Mr. Sadusky said. “Political has been very, very strong in the last couple of cycles and we anticipate it to be very strong going forward.”
That’s not to say that it’s unimportant to the national TV peddlers:
“There’s going to be a lot of money spent,” CBS CEO Leslie Moonves said in December. “I’m not saying that’s the best thing for America, but it’s not a bad thing for the CBS Corporation.”
CBS will receive about $230 million in political advertising this year, Mr. DiClemente estimated in the note. Without political ads, CBS’s broadcast revenue would be unchanged from a year ago, he wrote.
Ah, the free market at work…
As for this post’s title, I kid. It wouldn’t be possible for an election to be 45 percent worse than the fraud-fest of 2008. We’re far, far into asymptote territory on this front.
Tuesday, February 7th, 2012
Learn it. Copy it.
Monday, February 6th, 2012
No anti-capitalist, anti-marketing blog can afford to avoid day-after commentary on the theme of Super Bowl ads. The “greatest spectacle in American sports” is, after all, also the biggest day of the year in the underlying endeavor of corporate marketing.
FWIW, TCT hereby refers you to DbC for this year’s mutual take.
Saturday, February 4th, 2012
The New York Times today runs a shameless butt-kiss piece on Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. Contrary to the thesis of the NYT, which is that Sandberg is somehow a new sort of feminist as well as a “self-made” (a word used twice in the story) business genius, Sandberg might actually be even more odious than either Facebook or its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, both heavyweight champeens in the field of being hard to take.
According to the story, Sandberg considers it her mission to deny the impact of social structure and political policy on women. “[I]n her view,” the Times reporter explains, women “must take responsibility for their careers and not blame men for holding them back.”
Ms. Sandberg sees herself as more than an executive at one of the hottest companies around — more, too, than someone who will soon rank among the few self-made billionaires who are women. She sees herself as a role model for women in business and technology. In speeches, she often urges women to “keep your foot on the gas pedal,” and to aim high.
And, as she engages in such trite talk about “men” and fails to mention social class or the backward state of U.S. family welfare programs, exactly how self-made is Ms. Sandberg?
According to her 2004 NYT wedding announcement, “She is a daughter of Adele and Joel Sandberg of Miami. The bride’s father, an ophthalmologist, is a partner in Eye Surgery Associates, a group practice in Hollywood, Fla.”
Well, there you have it. Aren’t those the same basic conditions facing all little girls? Daddy’s a surgeon and I’m prepping for Harvard — I refuse to slip and have to go to FSU! And baseball starts at third base, right?
And is Sandberg spending her every hour trying to turn Facebook’s billions into better services, as her creepy CEO would have you presume? Um, unless you’re a major Procter & Gamble shareholder, not quite:
Part of Ms. Sandberg’s role has been to cultivate relationships with large advertisers seeking new ways to engage with customers — particularly female ones — online. She was instrumental in signing up advertisers like Procter & Gamble. After several meetings with Facebook, Procter chose the platform for a new Secret deodorant campaign aimed at young women.
“P.& G. wants to be where the people are, and more and more people are spending their time on social sites,” says Alex Tosolini, vice president of Procter’s global e-business unit. “The purpose of our Secret campaign was to inspire women of all ages to be more fearless.”
It’s a message that sounds similar to Ms. Sandberg’s. And it bumped domestic sales of Secret deodorant by 9 percent in the first six months of the campaign and raised Secret’s market share by 5 percent from the period a year earlier.
Glory, glory hallelujah! What great times we live in!
Friday, February 3rd, 2012
It’s a timeless question about overlords both ancient and new. Are they lying or do they actually believe their own ideology?
The issue popped up this past week in this howler enunciated by Mark Zuckerberg:
“We don’t build services in order to make money,” he wrote in a personal letter to shareholders included in [Facebook's IPO-related SEC] filing. “We make money in order to build better services.”
Rofl-Lulz.
One might ask if Facebook would be willing to appoint a majority of ordinary Facebook users to its corporate board, so as to assure itself of the authenticity of its supposed efforts at “better” services. Should there be ads on Facebook? Should Facebook accumulate the world’s biggest marketing database and make money for Mark Zuckerberg and other rich people by selling the scraped, uncompensated information to other corporate capitalists? Who votes “No”?
Yeah, didn’t think so…
Friday, January 27th, 2012
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.
