Behind the Scenes

Marching Orders

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TCT got started by pointing out the relationship between marketing and mainstream politics in the United States. Since power concedes nothing without an adequate demand, this has hardly changed in the past 12 years.

As a service to your own sanity in this latest season of “politics,” TCT encourages all its friends to acquaint themselves with the Partnership for America’s Healthcare Future.

This front group is the obvious-but-unreported locus from which the petty-elite that still runs the Democratic Party takes its main position in the upcoming 2020 marketing contest.

The nature of the thing is not difficult to discern, for those few of us lucky enough to know how to locate the relevant facts within our corporate media ecology’s maelstrom of distractions and diversions.

With Joe Biden, the DP elite is showing itself to be entirely willing to lose the next election by running the most hagged-out candidate in its long history of running hagged-out candidates, rather than sever such ties.

This, in the year 2020, against the supposedly hated Trump.

Cities as Spyware

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Have you heard about “smart cities”? Guess what? They are a marketing research operation.

This, of course, is no surprise to those of us hip to what corporate capitalism really is. By its nature, it fuels an ever-growing marketing race, which itself requires more and more spaces, places, experiences, and entities to become platforms for commodity-promotion.

Consider LinkNYC. It is run by Intersection, which is a corporate marketing agency.

Here is how Intersection’s Chief Revenue Officer describes LinkNYC, which, again, his firm runs:

With award-winning products like LinkNYC, the largest and fastest free public Wi-Fi network in the world, Intersection connects the digital and physical worlds, enhancing people’s journeys through their cities and offering brands the opportunity to drive more relevant and engaging advertising, rooted in real-world context.

Source: Advertising Age, June 20, 2019

So, yes, sports fans, the moment has arrived: American towns and cities are now themselves data-gathering tools for our behavior-engineering overclass. Big business marketing is now bigger than the biggest metropolises, which it now treats as just another deployable asset.

All, of course, with the help of our dear liberal leaders.

Welcome to the Beacosystem

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target image

Corporate capitalism fuels an ever-expanding marketing race, which means a competitive, ever-expanding effort to study and profitably re-design off-the-job behavior.

Today’s New York Times carries an interesting story by Michael Kwet on what Kwet calls “the beacosystem.” This is the growing deployment of movement-tracking-and-recording Bluetooth beacons in retail and other spaces. The practice is known in the trade as “geomarketing.”

The means of accomplishing this immensely valuable form of behavioral monitoring is, of course, the cellular telephone. Apparently, many apps have deals to build undisclosed beacon tracking capability into their products:

The makers of many popular apps, such as those for news or weather updates, insert these toolkits into their apps. They might be paid by the beacon companies or receive other benefits, like detailed reports on their users.

And, of course, the story gets even worse. According to Kwet:

There is no easy way to determine which apps on your phone have the beacon location tracking built in. Even if you did know which companies have access to your beacon data, there’s no way to know what kind of data is collected through the app. It could be your micro-location, dwell time or foot traffic, but it can also include data from the app, such as your name, and your app data can be combined with other data sets compiled about you by data brokers. There is simply no transparency.

Paging Dr. Pavlov

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drooling dog

Behind the scenes, big business marketers view their “targets” precisely as Ivan Pavlov viewed his laboratory dogs.

Jeremy Helfand, VP & Head of Advertising Platforms at Hulu, labors to figure how to get modern TV users to pay attention to sponsors’ ads. This requires, Helfand says, a trope that “rewards the viewer for this natural experience, this natural behavior that’s now happening in streaming television.”

It’s cute, of course, that watching television now counts as a “natural behavior,” but you get the point. Rewarded behaviors.

Farewell to an Empty Soul

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Lee Clow image Very sorry, but TCT just has to ask it: At what point did he drop the “n”?

The marketing press just now is abuzz over the retirement of Lee Clow, the Chiat/Day agency bigwig whom Advertising Age breathlessly describes as “the creative mind behind ads like Apple’s ‘Think Different’ and Adidas’ ‘Impossible is Nothing.'”

Marketing honchos provide an interesting window into the psychopathology of excessive privilege. Having spent their years creating particularly shameless forms of propaganda, they are usually, upon such occasions, extra loquacious about their own endeavors.

To celebrate his own retirement, Mr. Clow, who obviously fancies himself something of a hippie/rebel, has released a “love letter to advertising.”

What’s in it? Apart from triteness and narcissism, very, very little.

Fascinating, meanwhile, that the big farewell of a supposedly major brain who retires the same week as scientists warn about the impending extinction of all insect life on Earth has nothing to say about the various wider effects of an industry that exists to “make people…maybe even buy something.”

History, should we figure out how to continue it, is very unlikely to smile upon the solipsism of such multi-millionaire clowns.

Meanwhile, it would be interesting if we were somehow able to debate how much creativity really went into “Think Different” and “Impossible is Nothing.” Doesn’t seem all that impressive, does it?