Media Permaculture
OK, I think this is taking niche marketing way too far!
The Worst Horse / How do I love thee, Bizarro Thai Ronald McDonald? Let me count the ways….:
I love that you offer your hands to me in a Buddhist expression of gratefulness and reconciliation. It’s so surprising. Almost as if I’ve never seen you before.
It’s strange that the NYT took so long to cover this issue, but now that the FCC will investigate branded entertainment– which ranges from product placement to complete brand universes– it is deemed news. This story actually gives me great confidence, actually, because it is a reminder that people do in fact have the capacity to ignore ads and negotiate their reality around them. I know I’m flogging a dead horse here, but I will repeat again that media critics need to look more closely at the spaces where people resist and contest marketing, instead of just at where they are being manipulated.
So That’s Why They Drink Coke on TV - New York Times:
ADVERTISING is often like a game of cat and mouse. Consumers try as hard as they can to run away from sales pitches and commercial jingles, so marketers continually seek new ways to hunt them down.
Skip to next paragraphOne of the more popular tricks — oops, I meant to say tactics — advertisers are using today is branded entertainment, which ranges from plopping a Pepsi can into a scene to writing entire television scripts based around Oreo cookies. They like this approach so much that they’re increasing the money they spend on so-called product integrations at double-digit rates, making it one of the faster growth areas for an otherwise stalled television industry.
But does product integration dupe consumers? The Federal Communications Commission is considering investigating this question, and the commissioners may add it to their public agenda as early as Tuesday.
Technorati Tags: FCC
A beautiful discourse on the intersection between mythology and brands. I’d hate to pollute this wonderful discourse with my own words. Please read the whole thing, it’s well worth your time.
The Holy Breath of Inspiration (Triple Pundit):
The Nike swoosh is a great example of a brand that holds a key to one of these core mythological human needs. The swoosh is air. It is ethereal and quickly able to “Just Do It.” It moves effortlessly and with great power. The Nike corporation defines itself as being in service to human potential. According to Nike, “If you have a body, you are an athlete.” Basically, the story of the swoosh proclaims a universal truth: if you are breathing, you are alive, and you are wrought with physical potential through the breath, the element of air.
According to David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous, our verbiage is formed by sounds in nature. Therefore, it is not uncommon to notice that certain words, like swoosh, replicate the sounds of what they represent. Swoosh is definitely a wind word. Abram also notes that the holy word for the un-nameable divine essence, Yahweh, actually represents the breath by inhale (yah) and exhale (weh). If one takes a deep breath with lips slightly parted, the subtle sound of yah-weh can be heard. So, the essence of living consciousness, breath, is the only sound-name to approximate the divinity of what cannot be described: the mystery of life.
AlterNet: MediaCulture: So You Think You Can Raise a Brand-Free Kid?:
“I think we’re seen as consumers…how much wallet share do kids have, and how much can they influence our spending.”
Yet the push to buy doesn’t jive with the values these parents want to instill in their own kids — values like critical thinking, individuality and sustainable living.
I’m sorry but the prevailing wisdom that branding destroys kid’s minds is wrong. Bad parenting destroys, or at least hinders, childhood development. Stop blaming corporations. Branding does not prevent critical thinking, only censoring the dominant reality does. This doesn’t mean that I agree with branding to kids, but it’s the parents that need education. Talk to your kids about media– they are intelligent. But don’t block reality from them, it will only make it more attractive.
PS: I posted the above comment at Alternet where the article in question was posted, and I notice that the readers over their don’t like what I have to say (my comment is rating at 2 on a scale of 1 to 5). It occurs to me that on the surface that I may come across like a pro-media capitalist, but nothing would be further from the truth. I just no longer agree with all the fear mongering concerning media. Part of that requires a long back story and my book (out next April!) that explains more clearly why I came to this point. Regular readers of my blog will pick up on the reasons here and there.
I think the problem in general with media activism is that it adheres to a one to many mass media model of communication without acknowledging that we are in a transition to a many to many communication environment. The assumption– especially coming from the Adbuster folks– is that they believe we are injected with all this evil ideology– when the situation is far more complex. We exist in a mental ecosystem that is also composed of countervailing influences. The reason I was able to become my own person despite the total mediation of my youth was that I had parents interested in art and education, I was a punk rocker which required using media as our art, and other intangibles I can’t explain. The point is that I had a strong immune system that made the messages I was exposed to less “sticky.”
I realize the word “media educator” could sound nefarious. After all, isn’t advertising “media education” on how to be good consumers? Media educators teach media literacy, but I hate that term, because it implies that if we learned to understand media like books we would be smarter and better, and this is not true. I agree with Marshal McLuhan that current media is just an extension of the thought forms that were codified by the alphabet and printing press. So if people want to get pissed about the current state of media, consider how books have destroyed our communal way of thinking (because books make us silent, isolated experiencers of knowledge). I’m not anti-book, but all this media bashing is also not addressing the problem.
Having grown up around a lot of kids who survived hippie communes, I can say this with great confidence. Many of those kids denied McDonalds, sugar, and TV just indugled in it in more extremes until it got out of their systems. Then they became stock brokers and real estate agents. No joke. Anyhow, my message is to stop being scared of media and believe more strongly in your capacity to withstand brainwashing. Call me an optimist, but i believe in the innate intelligence of human beings to know the difference between bullshit and what is good for them, even if it’s delayed sometimes due to poor environmental conditions (i.e. closed communities, poor education, bad diet, etc).
Hmmmm. An interesting article on the blurring of yet another boundary: private and public speech. It questions whether Gore and Bono are pushing the limits of the public sphere by making social causes corporate affairs. My feeling? The more the merrier. But… I also do not like the paternalistic approach of either that focuses on individuals as saviors.
Turning to corporate America to save the world — baltimoresun.com:
Politics and social causes are the stuff of society’s public sphere, but the public sphere is being overwhelmed by the corporate logic of cause-related marketing.
The privatizing of Bono’s AIDS-prevention message offers a window on how this phenomenon is transforming political speech. Sponsors of the Red Campaign take Bono’s message, produce surreal versions of it, infuse it into products and then market it back to consumers. Consider a current Gap Red Campaign advertisement: “Can a T-shirt save the world? This one can! … 20,000. The number of women and children in Africa who can receive AIDS treatment for a year thanks to the contributions from your purchases of Gap Product Red.”
Is this ad commercial or political? Does it propose a commercial transaction? Is it misleading?
Advertising in the 21st century is less about proposing a transaction and more about constructing identities around corporate brands. But constructing personal and social identity fits more closely with political than commercial speech.
The First Amendment protects the sort of political dialogue Mr. Gore and Bono are promoting and prevents the government from regulating such dialogue without some extremely good reason. But the government is allowed to protect consumers from misleading product information by regulating commercial speech.
From the Onion News
I think Adidas is taking the idea of viral marketing a little too seriously. Watch it and bleed.
Technorati Tags: puppy
Excuse my Italian, but I am so fed up with the kind of bullshit that marketers obsess about, such as the idea that brands should equal identity. Yes it’s true that teens want to belong to something and fashion provides the necessary codes for that association, but a brand is not a tribe, and anyone who wants to promote this idea should be exiled to a brandless netherworld, like a dark cave and a hand drum for company, so as to be deprogrammed of this silly and useless thought process. Spare us the brain cells, puhleeeze!
The following excerpt is from an article on teen marketing that exemplifies perfectly why this insanity has to stop:
How To Reach Teens? It’s All About the Brand:
“It’s typical,” said Anastasia Goodstein, founder of teen marketing site Ypulse.com, San Francisco. “Teens are going through a stage in their life where they are figuring out who they are. As they change their own identities multiple times, the brands adjust along with that. They can be completely in an Abercrombie phase and they switch to another group of friends, get into Emo music and are shopping at Hot Topic instead.”
Now, I don’t want to harp too badly on Goodstein because I think she has good intentions in terms of helping bridge adults and teens (you can read her book on the subject, Totally Wired). But it is the overall tone of the Brandweek article that makes me angry, especially the title, “What Teens Want? It’s All about the Brand.” As the research in the story points out, one third surveyed said the world would be a better place if there were no brands, yet kids still want their iPods. The article suggests that it’s the brand that is important here, but I disagree. The iPod is a great product: it helps you build and organize a soundtrack for your life. When I was a teen, music is what got me through my darkest moments. The key is not that Apple has successfully branded teens, it’s that teens gravitate towards authenticity, music being one of the few places where that exists in their lives.
So my suggestion is to not get caught up in whether or not brands are what teens care about but to assist them in deepening their life experience. Who gives a shit about Abercrombie or Hot Topic. Give them what they really want: love, respect, authenticity and cool tools to assist in their creative development.
Technorati Tags: brands
As the hype machine salivates over Steve Jobs‘ announcement of the the new iPhone (at a whopping $400 price tag!), Greenpeace is pushing for a better ecology policy at Apple. At issue is the continued built-in obsolescence of Apple’s products (as a Mac user, you can imagine the frustration of the constant equipment upgrades that have leapfrogged me over the past few years), and the toxic by-product of used computers and batteries. The trailer above is for a movie, Digital Dump, which documents the journey of hi-tech junk. So while I love my Powerbook, at the same time I have to keep in mind that the consumption of electronics and their attendant dream world have a direct environmental impact, from toxic waste to the carbon emissions by-product of the electricity I use to produce media. For more information about digital dumping, go to the Basel Action Network. Also, you can read this great article from Solon.com, “Where computers go to die– and kill.”
The photo below is from a Chinese computer scrapyard where poor people extract precious metals from computer parts.
Exposing Apple’s Core | Greenpeace USA:
Getting to the Core
As this year’s MacWorld expo kicked off in San Francisco, we wanted to show the participants what’s really beneath the skin of their favorite Apple products. Greenpeace activists projected giant images of the Asian scrapyards where many electronic products - including those made by Apple - end up at the end of their lives. Images of electronics being melted down, taken apart and releasing toxic chemicals were displayed above the front of the Apple store.
Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone
Mediacology
(click here to buy from Amazon.com)
Find out more about the book here.
Bridging media literacy with ecoliteracy, written by Antonio Lopez, an old school dharma punk and media educator. Occasionally he shoots from the lip, bloviates, misspells and can be tangential.
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