Facebook's Future Plans for Data Collection Beyond Imagination

Facebook's dark plans for the future are given away in its patent applications.
December 4, 2013 | Alternet (via Counterpunch)

“No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether at the end of this tremendous development, entirely new prophets will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive self-importance. For of the fast stage of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved.’”
—Max Weber, 1905

On November 12,  Facebook, Inc. filed its 178th patent application for a consumer profiling technique the company calls “inferring household income for users of a social networking system.”

“The amount of information gathered from users,” explain Facebook programmers Justin Voskuhl and Ramesh Vyaghrapuri in their patent application, “is staggering — information describing recent moves to a new city, graduations, births, engagements, marriages, and the like.” Facebook and other so-called tech companies have been warehousing all of this information since their respective inceptions. In Facebook’s case, its data vault includes information posted as early as 2004, when the site first went live. Now in a single month the amount of information forever recorded by Facebook —dinner plans, vacation destinations, emotional states, sexual activity, political views, etc.— far surpasses what was recorded during the company’s first several years of operation. And while no one outside of the company knows for certain, it is believed that Facebook has amassed one of the widest and deepest databases in history. Facebook has over 1,189,000,000 “monthly active users” around the world as of October 2013, providing considerable width of data. And Facebook has stored away trillions and trillions of missives and images, and logged other data about the lives of this billion plus statistical sample of humanity. Adjusting for bogus or duplicate accounts it all adds up to about 1/7th of humanity from which some kind of data has been recorded.

According to Facebook’s programmers like Voskuhl and Vyaghrapuri, of all the clever uses they have already applied this pile of data toward, Facebook has so far “lacked tools to synthesize this information about users for targeting advertisements based on their perceived income.” Now they have such a tool thanks to the retention and analysis of variable the company’s positivist specialists believe are correlated with income levels.

They’ll have many more tools within the next year to run similar predictions. Indeed, Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Twitter, and the hundreds of smaller tech lesser-known tech firms that now control the main portals of social, economic, and political life on the web (which is now to say everywhere as all economic and much social activity is made cyber) are only getting started. The Big Data analytics revolution has barely begun, and these firms are just beginning to tinker with rational-instrumental methods of predicting and manipulating human behavior.

There are few, if any, government regulations restricting their imaginations at this point. Indeed, the U.S. President himself is a true believer in Big Data; the brain of Obama’s election team was a now famous “cave” filled with young Ivy League men (and a few women) sucking up electioneering information and crunching demographic and consumer data to target individual voters with appeals timed to maximize the probability of a vote for the new Big Blue, not IBM, but the Democratic Party’s candidate of “Hope” and “Change.” The halls of power are enraptured by the potential of rational-instrumental methods paired with unprecedented access to data that describes the social lives of hundreds of millions.

Facebook’s intellectual property portfolio reads like cliff notes summarizing the aspirations of all corporations in capitalist modernity; to optimize efficiency in order to maximize profits and reduce or externalize risk. Unlike most other corporations, and unlike previous phases in the development of rational bureaucracies, Facebook and its tech peers have accumulated never before seen quantities of information about individuals and groups. Recent breakthroughs in networked computing make analysis of these gigantic data sets fast and cheap. Facebook’s patent holdings are just a taste of what’s arriving here and now.

The way you type, the rate, common mistakes, intervals between certain characters, is all unique, like your fingerprint, and there are already cyber robots that can identify you as you peck away at keys. Facebook has even patented methods of individual identification with obviously cybernetic overtones, where the machine becomes an appendage of the person. U.S. Patents 8,306,256, 8,472,662, and 8,503,718, all filed within the last year, allow Facebook’s web robots to identify a user based on the unique pixelation and other characteristics of their smartphone’s camera. Identification of the subject is the first step toward building a useful data set to file among the billion or so other user logs. Then comes analysis, then prediction, then efforts to influence a parting of money.

The way you type, the rate, common mistakes, intervals between certain characters, is all unique, like your fingerprint, and there are already cyber robots that can identify you as you peck away at keys.

Many Facebook patents pertain to advertising techniques that are designed and targeted, and continuously redesigned with ever-finer calibrations by robot programs, to be absorbed by the gazes of individuals as they scroll and swipe across their Facebook feeds, or on third party web sites.

Speaking of feeds, U.S. Patent 8,352,859, Facebook’s system for “Dynamically providing a feed of stories about a user of a social networking system” is used by the company to organize the constantly updated posts and activities inputted by a user’s “friends.” Of course embedded in this system are means of inserting advertisements. According to Facebook’s programmers, a user’s feeds are frequently injected with “a depiction of a product, a depiction of a logo, a display of a trademark, an inducement to buy a product, an inducement to buy a service, an inducement to invest, an offer for sale, a product description, trade promotion, a survey, a political message, an opinion, a public service announcement, news, a religious message, educational information, a coupon, entertainment, a file of data, an article, a book, a picture, travel information, and the like.” That’s a long list for sure, but what gets injected is more often than not whatever will boost revenues for Facebook.

The advantage here, according to Facebook, is that “rather than having to initiate calls or emails to learn news of another user, a user of a social networking website may passively receive alerts to new postings by other users.” The web robot knows best. Sit back and relax and let sociality wash over you, passively. This is merely one of Facebook’s many “systems for tailoring connections between various users” so that these connections ripple with ads uncannily resonant with desires and needs revealed in the quietly observed flow of e-mails, texts, images, and clicks captured forever in dark inaccessible servers of Facebook, Google and the like. These communications services are free in order to control the freedom of data that might otherwise crash about randomly, generating few opportunities for sales.

Where this fails Facebook ratchets up the probability of influencing the user to behave as a predictable consumer. “Targeted advertisements often fail to earn a user’s trust in the advertised product,” explain Facebook’s programmers in U.S. Patent 8,527,344, filed in September of this year. “For example, the user may be skeptical of the claims made by the advertisement. Thus, targeted advertisements may not be very effective in selling an advertised product.” Facebook’s computer programmers who now profess mastery over sociological forces add that even celebrity endorsements are viewed with skepticism by the savvy citizen of the modulated Internet. They’re probably right.

Facebook’s solution is to mobilize its users as trusted advertisers in their own right. “Unlike advertisements, most users seek and read content generated by their friends within the social networking system; thus,” concludes Facebook’s mathematicians of human inducement, “advertisements generated by a friend of the user are more likely to catch the attention of the user, increasing the effectiveness of the advertisement.” That Facebook’s current So-And-So-likes-BrandX ads are often so clumsy and ineffective does not negate the qualitative shift in this model of advertising and the possibilities of un-freedom it evokes.

Forget iPhones and applications, the tech industry’s core consumer product is now advertising. Their essential practice is mass surveillance conducted in real time through continuous and multiple sensors that pass, for most people, entirely unnoticed. The autonomy and unpredictability of the individual —in Facebook’s language the individual is the “user”— is their fundamental business problem. Reducing autonomy via surveillance and predictive algorithms that can placate existing desires, and even stimulate and mold new desires is the tech industry’s reason for being. Selling their capacious surveillance and consumer stimulus capabilities to the highest bidder is the ultimate end.

Sounds too dystopian? Perhaps, and this is by no means the world we live in, not yet. It is, however, a tendency rooted in the tech economy. The advent of mobile, hand-held, wirelessly networked computers, called “smartphones,” is still so new that the technology, and its services feel like a parallel universe, a new layer of existence added upon our existing social relationships, business activities, and political affiliations. In many ways it feels liberating and often playful. Our devices can map geographic routes, identify places and things, provide information about almost anything in real time, respond to our voices, and replace our wallets. Who hasn’t consulted “Dr. Google” to answer a pressing question? Everyone and everything is seemingly within reach and there is a kind of freedom to this utility.

Most of Facebook’s “users” have only been registered on the web site since 2010, and so the quintessential social network feels new and fun, and although perhaps fraught with some privacy concerns, it does not altogether feel like a threat to the autonomy of the individual. To say it is, is a cliche sci-fi nightmare narrative of tech-bureaucracy, and we all tell one another that the reality is more complex.

Privacy continues, however, too be too narrowly conceptualized as a liberal right against incursions of government, and while the tech companies have certainly been involved in a good deal of old-fashioned mass surveillance for the sake of our federal Big Brother, there’s another means of dissolving privacy that is more fundamental to the goals of the tech companies and more threatening to social creativity and political freedom.

Georgetown University law professor Julie Cohen notes that pervasive surveillance is inimical to the spaces of privacy that are required for liberal democracy, but she adds importantly, that the surveillance and advertising strategies of the tech industry goes further.

“A society that permits the unchecked ascendancy of surveillance infrastructures, which dampen and modulate behavioral variability, cannot hope to maintain a vibrant tradition of cultural and technical innovation,” writes Cohen in a forthcoming Harvard Law Review article:

“Modulation” is Cohen’s term for the tech industry’s practice of using algorithms and other logical machine operations to mine an individual’s data so as to continuously personalize information streams. Facebook’s patents are largely techniques of modulation, as are Google’s and the rest of the industry leaders. Facebook conducts meticulous surveillance on users, collects their data, tracks their movements on the web, and feeds the individual specific content that is determined to best resonate with their desires, behaviors, and predicted future movements. The point is to perfect the form and function of the rational-instrumental bureaucracy as defined by Max Weber: to constantly ratchet up efficiency, calculability, predictability, and control. If they succeed in their own terms, the tech companies stand to create a feedback loop made perfectly to fit each an every one of us, an increasingly closed systems of personal development in which the great algorithms in the cloud endlessly tailor the psychological and social inputs of humans who lose the gift of randomness and irrationality.

“It is modulation, not privacy, that poses the greater threat to innovative practice. Regimes of pervasively distributed surveillance and modulation seek to mold individual preferences and behavior in ways that reduce the serendipity and the freedom to tinker on which innovation thrives.” 

Cohen has pointed out the obvious irony here, not that it’s easy to miss; the tech industry is uncritically labeled America’s hothouse of innovation, but it may in fact be killing innovation by disenchanting the world and locking inspiration in an cage.

If there were limits to the reach of the tech industry’s surveillance and stimuli strategies it would indeed be less worrisome. Only parts of our lives would be subject to this modulation, and it could therefore benefit us. But the industry aspires to totalitarian visions in which universal data sets are constantly mobilized to transform an individual’s interface with society, family, the economy, and other institutions. The tech industry’s luminaries are clear in their desire to observe and log everything, and use every “data point” to establish optimum efficiency in life as the pursuit of consumer happiness. Consumer happiness is, in turn, a step toward the rational pursuit of maximum corporate profit. We are told that the “Internet of things” is arriving, that soon every object will have embedded within it a computer that is networked to the sublime cloud, and that the physical environment will be made “smart” through the same strategy of modulation so that we might be made free not just in cyberspace, but also in the meatspace.

Whereas the Internet of the late 1990s matured as an archipelago of innumerable disjointed and disconnected web sites and databases, today’s Internet is gripped by a handful of giant companies that observe much of the traffic and communications, and which deliver much of the information from an Android phone or laptop computer, to distant servers, and back. The future Internet being built by the tech giants —putting aside the Internet of things for the moment— is already well into its beta testing phase. It’s a seamlessly integrated quilt of web sites and apps that all absorb “user” data, everything from clicks and keywords to biometric voice identification and geolocation.

United States Patent 8,572,174, another of Facebook’s recent inventions, allows the company to personalize a web page outside of Facebook’s own system with content from Facebook’s databases. Facebook is selling what the company calls its “rich set of social information” to third party web sites in order to “provide personalized content for their users based on social information about those users that is maintained by, or otherwise accessible to, the social networking system.” Facebook’s users generated this rich social information, worth many billions of dollars as recent quarterly earnings of the company attest.

In this way the entire Internet becomes Facebook. The totalitarian ambition here is obvious, and it can be read in the securities filings, patent applications, and other non-sanitized business documents crafted by the tech industry for the financial analysts who supply the capital for further so-called innovation. Everywhere you go on the web, with your phone or tablet, you’re a “user,” and your social network data will be mined every second by every application, site, and service to “enhance your experience,” as Facebook and others say. The tech industry’s leaders aim to expand this into the physical world, creating modulated advertising and environmental experiences as cameras and sensors track our movements.

Facebook and the rest of the tech industry fear autonomy and unpredictability. The ultimate expression of these irrational variables that cannot be mined with algorithmic methods is absence from the networks of surveillance in which data is collected.

One of Facebook’s preventative measures is United States Patent 8,560,962, “promoting participation of low-activity users in social networking system.” This novel invention devised by programmers in Facebook’s Palo Alto and San Francisco offices involves a “process of inducing interactions,” that are meant to maximize the amount of “user-generated content” on Facebook by getting lapsed users to return, and stimulating all users to produce more and more data. User generated content is, after all, worth billions. Think twice before you hit “like” next time, or tap that conspicuously placed “share” button; a machine likely put that content and interaction before your eyes after a logical operation determined it to have the highest probability of tempting you to add to the data stream, thereby increasing corporate revenues.

Facebook’s patents on techniques of modulating “user” behavior are few compared to the real giants of the tech industry’s surveillance and influence agenda. Amazon, Microsoft, and of course Google hold some of the most fundamental patents using personal data to attempt to shape an individual’s behavior into predictable consumptive patterns. Smaller specialized firms like Choicestream and Gist Communications have filed dozens more applications for modulation techniques. The rate of this so-called innovation is rapidly telescoping.

Perhaps we do know who will live in the iron cage. It might very well be a cage made of our own user generated content, paradoxically ushering in a new era of possibilities in shopping convenience and the delivery of satisfactory experiences even while it eradicates many degrees of chance, and pain, and struggle (the motive forces of human progress) in a robot-powered quest to have us construct identities and relationships that yield to prediction and computer-generated suggestion. Defense of individual privacy and autonomy today is rightly motivated by the reach of an Orwellian security state (the NSA, FBI, CIA). This surveillance changes our behavior by chilling us, by telling us we are always being watched by authority. Authority thereby represses in us whatever might happen to be defined as “crime,” or any anti-social behavior at the moment. But what about the surveillance that does not seek to repress us, the watching computer eyes and ears that instead hope to stimulate a particular set of monetized behaviors in us with the intimate knowledge gained from our every online utterance, even our facial expressions and finger movements?

Advertising

Planned Obsolescence: Products Designed to Fail

Planned Obsolescence: How Companies Encourage Hyperconsumption
by Sylvain Lapoix - OWNI.eu

Like many of their professors, students at the Sorbonne had become used to going to buy their ink cartridges from a small shop on a nearby street. With no manufacturer affiliations, it carried shelves full of ‘generic’ cartridges that worked with printers from big name brands like Epson, Canon, HP and Brother. But that small shop soon faced a very big problem: some new printers only recognise ‘proprietary’ consumables that they can detect by matching their hardware signature against a signature in a chip on the cartridge. Anybody hoping to get round that by using a syringe to top up their existing cartridge with new ink was soon caught out because the chips can also track ink levels. But try seeing things from the manufacturers’ point of view: print cartridge sales can represent up to 90% of their turnover, so it’s not hard to see why they want to prevent consumers from going elsewhere. This process of trapping consumers in an endless cycle of buying more by supplying products that soon become unusable or beyond repair has taken on the almost cult name of ‘planned obsolescence.’

This rather abstract term hides a whole range of manufacturing and marketing techniques that all share a single aim: encouraging consumers to buy more to keep factories busy and products flying off the shelves. The easiest way to achieve this is to reduce a product’s life cycle by employing different techniques that lead to a constant squeeze on labour costs and a wasteful use of natural resources, with little concern for the current shortages in raw materials, although the practice has managed to hold back the price of rare metals and copper.

From disposable light bulbs to the iPad 2

Just after the First World War, the future of filament-based electric bulbs looked very bright when a commercial agreement between the Allies and Germany was signed. Before the ink was even dry on the Treaty of Versailles, Dutch firm Philips, the American General Electric and German Osram joined forces with other European and Japanese companies in an agreement to limit the lifespan of their light bulbs and fix prices as part of the Phoebus cartel.

 

But it would take the simultaneous arrival of the Depression and Frederick Taylor’s theory of scientific management to bring about the idea that it was both technically possible and commercially desirable to stimulate demand in the consumer. Often quoted as the first recorded mention of the term ‘planned obsolescence’, this 1932 text by Bernard London puts the problem as follows:

“In a word, people generally, in a frightened and hysterical mood, are using everything that they own longer than was their custom before the depression. In the earlier period of prosperity, the American people did not wait until the last possible bit of use had been extracted from every commodity. They replaced old articles with new for reasons of fashion and up-to-dateness. They gave up old homes and old automobiles long before they were worn out, merely because they were obsolete.”

For industrialists, the idea represented something of a commercial Holy Grail, a way to create more demand in a market that was already saturated. How could they sell more fridges, cars and shoes to customers that already had what they needed? They had three main solutions:

• technical: built weaker, less durable products that are impossible to repair;
• design: artificially age older products by making them seem old-fashioned and out-of date;
• legal: lobby for new legal requirements and standards that mean customers have to buy a new product to stay within the law.

Not every industry uses all three methods. Built-in technical planned obsolescence is more common with white goods (fridges, ovens and so on), but brand new designs and increasingly short turnaround times in between different generations of the same product is a something of a speciality for consumer electronics manufacturers. Apple has managed to achieve remarkable success by using both methods at the same time: its Macs are entirely proprietary and very difficult for the user to modify; if you try taking one apart yourself, you’ll find you’re no longer covered by the guarantee.

They form a closed system, meaning it’s hard to switch the hard drive or graphics card, or tweak the performance in any way, because the manufacturer is the only one that supplies the parts. Finally, software and hardware updates come along incredibly frequently. The manufacturer’s ‘addicted’ fans are encouraged by incessant publicity to upgrade to the latest expensive mobile phone, laptop or MP3 player—despite the fact that Apple’s products are part of the same low-cost supply chain with poorly-paid workers and cheap raw materials as everybody else’s. The firm’s main sub-contractor, Foxconn, uses parts of its factories to work on products for Apple’s rivals, including HP, Sony, Intel and Dell.

Writing planned obsolescence into law: the ‘lift cartel’

A great example of this ‘forced consumption’ is the humble lift.  The four main lift cabin manufacturers, Thyssenkrupp, Koné, Otis and Schindler, appealed to the French standards-setting body, AFNOR, after fatal accidents in Amiens and Strasbourg. They expressed their concerns to the minister, Gilles de Robien, who tabled a law that will lead to a huge replacement programme to ensure the country’s lifts are safe to run between 2013 and 2018.  This safety-critical upgrade is set to cost between four and eight billion euros.

But according to a report by Parisian councillor Ian Brossat published last year by Marianne2, the programme is very unlikely to be of much use to the general public. It’s not the lift cabins themselves that cause problems, but poor maintenance carried out by overworked technicians.  And the two accidents that led to the de Robien law were both triggered by insufficient maintenance …

These techniques have certainly had the desired effect. According to a joint report by Friends of the Earth and the French Centre for Independent Information on Waste, despite the fact that the market for manufactured goods was already saturated by the beginning of the 1980s, purchases of electronic and electrical equipment have grown six-fold since the 1990s. In the same time, another report by consumer organisation Que Choisir has shown that the average lifespan for white goods has fallen from 10-12 years before 2000 to just 6-8/9 years today.

A trend in favour of consumption

Guarantees and warranties, which have been getting shorter and shorter since the start of the last decade, represent the final chapter in this story. Writing in the Wall Street Journal, journalist Jane Spencer observed that “in the past year Dell Computer has slashed warranty periods from three years to one.”  At the same time, Apple’s earliest iPods were amongst the first products to offer users a mere 90 days of protection.

That’s just three months. The rapid reduction in labour costs in Asia, South Africa and former Eastern Bloc countries has meant that even pricey gadgets are now seen as disposable. Repairing is left to geeks, eco-activists or anybody nostalgic enough to still have an old soldering iron.

Putting these various ways of implementing planned obsolescence to one side though, it’s propaganda—in the original sense of the word, being able to convince the masses—that has had the biggest impact.  It has served to maintain the idea that using these techniques is legitimate, despite the disastrous consequences they have for society and the environment. Edward Bernays, the so-called ‘father of public relations’ goes much further than Bernard London ever did. His work contains the real basis of the idea that consumerism is a social fait accompli that now defines how we think about ourselves, what we do and our interactions with others. Woodrow Wilson asked the Austrian to help him encourage the American people to join the war effort in 1917, and in his 1928 book Propaganda, he explains how, while working for Lucky Strike, he managed to persuade women to start smoking.

Previously seen as primarily a men’s activity, Bernays succeeded in convincing American women to take up the habit by giving leading suffragettes free cigarettes and encouraging them to brandish them as ‘torches of freedom.’  This inversion of social meaning by attaching an artificial political meaning to an ordinary consumer product foreshadowed Noam Chomsky’s idea of ‘manufacturing consent.’

When marketing finally won the day over engineering, non-durability became a principle of industrial design forever.  But even before then, it was a social construct, as Victor Lebow, a distributor, explained in a 1955 article that is examined in documentary film The Story of Stuff:

“Our enormously productive economy … demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption … we need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

Permanent consumption is seen as proof of a happy, fulfilled life and leaves individuals with only one objective, accumulating and replacing material goods, with design contributing to making them more or less attractive. The mobile phone, the car, and the watch are the three examples par excellence of this vision. Linked with Bernays’ idea that we take pleasure in destroying our obsolete possessions, this world view also has echoes of Freud’s ‘death drive’, something also found in the writing of John Maynard Keynes by Gilles Dostaller and Bernard Maris. Except that at the time, the two economists were hoping to find an explanation for what had gone wrong with the system that led to it to destroying itself. But there is no reason to make the distinction: bankers and businessmen are consumers like the rest of us, but on a different scale. On their scale, the talk is of systemic crises rather than planned obsolescence. And these crises, we’re told, are equally vital in keeping the whole system turning.

Supreme Court strikes down state drug data mining law; rejects generic drug labeling suits

Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
By Reuters

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court struck down on Thursday a state law that prohibits the use of prescription drug records for marketing, in a case pitting free-speech rights against medical privacy concerns.

The high court handed a victory to data mining companies IMS Health, Verispan and Source Healthcare Analytics, a unit of Dutch publisher Wolters Kluwer, that collect and sell such information and that challenged the law.

(Reporting by James Vicini, editing by Gerald E. McCormick)


Thursday, June 23rd, 2011

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that generic drug companies cannot be sued under state law over allegations that they failed to provide adequate label warnings about potential side effects.

The justices handed a victory to Israel's Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd, Mylan Inc's UDL Laboratories and Iceland-based Actavis Inc by overturning U.S. appeals court rulings that allowed such lawsuits.

(Reporting by James Vicini, Editing by Gerald E. McCormick)

Marketing Peace and War

Making a Killing
By MISSY BEATTIE

I’m happy to run with the six peaceniks that stood trial in DC Superior Court on July 12th. Three are with Peace of the Action (POTA) and include Cindy Sheehan, national director of the organization, as well as Jon Gold and Jim Veeder. They were acquitted. Elaine Brower of Military Families Speak Out and Matthis Chiroux of Iraq Veterans Against the War were convicted, as was Leflora Cunningham-Walsh. I applaud these citizens of the world and their devotion to peace and activism. Sheehan and Gold have articles about the trial on POTA’s web address: peaceoftheaction.org/.

On July 13th, some of us gathered at the White House. We took a bullhorn to the president’s presidio and told Barack Obama what we think of his George Bushiness foreign policy. This was gratifying, a celebratory wrap for POTA’s July action, especially since the defendants, prior to the trial, had been under a “stay away order” from this area of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Now, this:

The young woman who sat across from me as I rode DC's Metro was an advertisement for peace. A large, flashy gold bracelet with interlocking peace medallions encircled her right wrist. Everywhere I turned, I saw peace symbols. On purses, backpacks, shirts, sandals, and earlobes.

While participating in POTA events, I rode the rails, walked, and ranted and railed. And I observed. Even infant wear is decorated with peace signs. Soon, Pampers will bear the insignia—if they don't already.

The commodification of peace is an extension of our war culture. If there were no war, the merchandizing of peace images would be unnecessary. But in our consumption-obsessed society, we juggle all the trends we can afford and much of what we can’t.

Parents buy for their children action figures with hands molded to support weaponry. Then, moving to the next store at the “maul,” they are lured to the register to have credit cards swiped to purchase toddler t-shirts with an image of a dove, a peace emblem, and, often, a written message. To wear with Star Wars undies. Both peace and war have become fashion statements. Malia Obama has fallen victim, wearing shirts adorned with peace symbols, despite her father’s stock in tirade—the war rhetoric—amid his war lust, robotic war, and nationalistic clichés.

Eight US troops were killed in Afghanistan over a 24-hour period during the writing of this article. July could be even more violent than June for NATO-led soldiers. One hundred died last month. I know, personally, that families who have opened the door to hear words that change lives forever are feeling a fall-to-the-floor agony and for months will say, "This can't be real."

In the center of criminal power that is Washington, DC, POTA brought together six to twelve people, most days, for antiwar actions.

Meanwhile, more than 1000 Afghans just amassed in the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif, shouting "Death to America." Is anyone surprised? Our invasion, occupation, and barbarism have devastated a population and an environment, killing who-knows-how-many civilians, yet the Afghan insurgency grows. The country is a slaughterhouse.

Here at home, specialty wholesalers and retailers are making a killing, selling peace images, manufactured, probably, in China.

The masters/merchants of war are making a killing, as well.

And the people who are apathetic to any understanding that war is impacting our planet, the economy, our humanity, and lives both at home and in the countries we occupy buy STUFF because it's shiny, comes in pretty colors, and is all the rage. Those who have no engagement in what is being committed in their names exploit peace.

Again, I say, if there were no war, peace symbols would be unnecessary. And so would a peace movement.

Marketing Ate Our Culture

I spent the bulk of my career in the marketing industry. Now I am 4 years removed from it. I make less money, but I'm a happier person. And I'm not paid to lie anymore.




Marketing Ate Our Culture
By Terry O'Reilly, AlterNet
March 22, 2010

Editor's Note: Terry O'Reilly is the author, with Mike Tennant, of the book Age of Persuasion: How Marketing Ate Our Culture from Random House Books. The essay that follows was written for AlterNet and based off that book.

What if I told you that you should be watching more commercials? Yes, I’m an adman. And yes, you’d expect me to say that. But you just might have a moral obligation to watch more commercials. Let me explain.

A few decades back, Texan Claudia Alta Taylor Johnson gazed down the highway and didn’t like what she saw. Billboards blocked her view of the plains, of the distant hills, and of her beloved wildflowers. So she complained to her husband. He had a fairly influential job. He was President of the United States. Like all good husbands, Lyndon Baines Johnson knew what was good for him, and prompted Congress to pass the Highway Beautification Act, which placed limits on the spread of posters - or billboards as they’re popularly known -- and preserved the views that Ladybird Johnson loved so much.

The new restrictions drew rave reviews, particularly from one British ex-pat, who later wrote: "As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and have never seen one improved by a billboard. Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard. When I retire, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon. How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?"


It’s a remarkable manifesto considering its author is the legendary advertising mogul David Ogilvy, he of Ogilvy & Mather advertising agency fame. Throughout his career, he railed at large outdoor posters, even though his advertising agency created hundreds, if not thousands, of them for their various blue-chip clients.

Let’s stick a bookmark in here for a moment, and go back in time a bit further. At the beginning of the 20th century, one of the most powerful advertising agencies in America was Lord & Thomas, headed by the most influential, albeit most forgotten adman ever to stride purposefully down Madison Avenue (even though he was based in Chicago, but stay with me). Inspired one day by Canadian copywriter John E. Kennedy’s famous insight that advertising really was “salesmanship on paper” and not just “news,” Lasker took that seemingly obvious tidbit and built Lord & Thomas into one of the world’s largest advertising empires.

Radio was just coming out of its wrapping back then, and Lasker initially paid little attention to the medium as it struggled for the economic model that would sustain it. What he couldn’t ignore, however, was the success of radio advertising pioneers such as Bernard Gimbel, of Gimbel’s department stores and Saks Fifth Avenue. Even harder to ignore was Lasker’s client David Sarnoff of RCA, who was also happened to be the founder of the NBC radio network in 1926. Eventually, Lasker decided to experiment with radio advertising and asked his New York office to create a program based on some sort of Broadway entertainment as a vehicle for Palmolive.

Meanwhile, NBC president Merlin Aylesworth didn’t believe in radio advertising as you hear it today, but preferred that sponsors (a word not yet invented in the late twenties) be mentioned before and after a program with a passing phrase like, “The following program comes to you through the courtesy of Lucky Strike.” Clearly, he hadn’t met Albert Lasker. But he was about to. The locomotive that was Albert Lasker had a completely different point of view: He reckoned that in exchange for underwriting a broadcast, brands should be offered an opportunity to present the sort of “reason why” advertising they did in print, but adapted for sound. Instead of parcels of space, they would occupy parcels of time. And that is how the broadcast “commercial,” as it came to be known, was born. Merlin, meet Albert.

In no time, Lasker was basking in the success of sponsored radio programs, like Amos ‘N Andy and The Pepsodent Show Starring Bob Hope, and quickly embraced the new medium on behalf of other clients. In solving a problem for his clients, Lasker provided the economic model radio had been struggling to find: big-name advertisers could provide big money to underwrite high-caliber entertainment for a mass audience. The bigger the audience, the greater the value to advertisers, and theoretically, the more they would pay for production. Radio would provide top-rank entertainment, but it would not be free.

Listeners would pay by allowing themselves to be exposed to a commercial. It seemed just the right fit in a world of compromise. You want to go camping? You tolerate mosquitoes. You want to fly? You tolerate removing your belt at airports. You want Groucho Marx in your living room? No problem, provided the nation’s three thousand Plymouth-De Soto dealers could tag along. And there it was: The Great Unwritten Contract. Sponsors funded programming, and in return, they took some of the listener’s time and attention.

And it was good.

When television took off in the 1950s, it suffered few of the birthing pains that radio had; Albert Lasker had provided a readymade economic template. At the same time, the postwar economic boom gave consumers enough cash to buy television sets, and as TV viewership grew, the value of its audience became increasingly attractive to advertisers. Sponsors lined up to pour fresh buckets of money into the new medium.

A large part of the attraction was the “mass audience” experience of the new medium; like radio, it drew millions of people to the same event during the same time span. The morning after a broadcast, it seemed that the talk was all about what “everyone” had been watching the night before: Ralph and Norton’s latest get-rich-quick scheme or which dress Uncle Miltie wore on Texaco Star Theatre. It was the shared experience, as much as the programs themselves that caused a buzz around the broadcasts. There was a thrill in knowing that millions of others were watching the same show at the same moment. Sponsors’ ads were a small price to pay.

OK, back to the bookmark. Here’s the point, and even Ogilvy agreed with this: Advertising has to uphold its end of the Great Unwritten Contract. Put simply, advertising has to give you something back in exchange for your time. At the low end of that transaction, the ads themselves have to at least be entertaining, or informative, or dramatically interesting. In other words, the advertiser has to reward you with a smile or a bit of information that you didn’t know before. That’s motherhood in this debate.

At the high end, the advertising has to give you something substantive back in exchange for your attention. Advertising should underwrite the entertainment. The ad revenue should be plowed back into creative production. So when CBS makes $271M per year from advertising revenue on Late Night With David Letterman, a big chunk of it goes to making more David Letterman shows. The ads in news programs fund the travel and salaries of the news gatherers around the world. The ads in a magazine fund the magazine content. Ads in a newspaper pay the reporter’s salaries. Paid keyword searches fund that wonderful little thing you call Google.

That’s the basis of the Great Unwritten Contract. The ads underwrite the programs or content you love, you sit through the ads in return. It was and is a good deal.

When advertising breaks that contract, trouble brews. I truly believe that you can chart the start of ad-induced bathroom runs to when advertising started to take but not give. When the ads themselves stopped being interesting, and became repetitive and relentless and unrewarding, people started getting annoyed with them. When 1950s ad gurus like Rosser Reeves believed that high repetition of kindergarten-like ad propositions (Anacin relieves headaches! Anacin relieves headaches!! Anacin relieves headaches!!!) were the path to big sales, he and admen like him, broke the contract. When one of his own clients asked Reeves whether the ice-pick-to-the-forehead strategy wasn’t turning people off, Reeves answered with a famous question: “Do you want to be liked, or do you want to be rich?”

I dislike telemarketing not just because it’s annoying, but also because it breaks the contract, disrespecting the customer and interrupting without apology. It breaks all the rules of good marketing, which is to say it isn’t pleasantly surprising or polite or humorous or meaningful. Telemarketers make no attempt to build a relationship with their clients, nor do they try to live up to the Contract: offering something in exchange for the customer’s time. Telemarketers don’t give you anything. They just call to take, and leave you with a cold bucket of the Colonel’s chicken.

Let’s talk cinema advertising. Unless I’m very wrong, ticket prices didn’t come down when ads went up. These days, the moviegoer has been demoted from welcome guest to mere chattel, whose time and attention are commodified and sold to a growing number of advertisers.

And for this you pay them.

Billboards have to figure out a way to give back. Ladybird was simply reacting to the fissure in the Contract. She didn’t know it then, but she was. Where was the giveback? Where was the reciprocity? Cut to Mr. Johnson having to introduce billboard legislation to keep the Mrs. happy while juggling civil rights and Viet Nam. No one said marriage was easy.

By now, you must think this is quite a rant for an adman. Followed by the question – will he ever work again?

Yet I believe in the Contract. Wholeheartedly. But here’s the thing: Every contract has two sides. A contract isn’t a contract until two people shake hands. Which means, if you have some favorite television programs like the Letterman show, or Survivor, or 60 Minutes, you should be honoring your side of the Contract, and watching the commercials embedded in those programs.

Because if you’re not, you’re breaking the Contract. You are in breach.

Every time you leave the room to go to the fridge, or to the bathroom during a commercial break, or fast-forward through the ads with your TiVo, you are quietly, surreptitiously, covertly, violating the Contract.

You get away with it because it’s not enforceable by law. If a roofing contractor took your money, and didn’t replace your roof, you’d be outraged. If your dentist sent you a bill but didn’t fill the cavity, you’d bounce off all four walls.

So how do you justify not watching the commercials that underwrite the programs you watch and religiously record?

Screw ‘em, I hear you say. The commercials they put out are crap, most are barely watchable. But there are also scores of good commercials. Just like there are good and bad movies, books and songs. As a matter of fact, the United States constantly ranks first or second internationally every year when it comes to creative advertising. It’s a verifiable fact.

So here we are at that rarely talked-about impasse. Advertisers break the contract with bad commercials, you avoid their commercials to punish them, but still take the programs. It’s like a Quentin Tarrantino standoff, where everyone has a gun.

So here’s an idea: Stop buying from advertisers that send you bad commercials. Every time you buy from those advertisers, they come to people like me and ask for more bad commercials. When I protest, they just point to their sales results, and the air goes out of my argument. They believe that bad ads work, because you, the consuming public, are enablers. Instead, only buy from the advertisers that assume intelligence, that make you smile, that give you advertising that tells you something you didn’t know 30 seconds ago, advertisers that respect you.

Then, stop the TiVo when you see one of their ads go whizzing by, rewind the machine, and watch the commercial. Don’t punch that button on your car radio when a good commercial comes on, listen to it. Read that interesting ad across from the story you’re devouring in Vanity Fair. Don’t answer the phone when a 1-800 number shows up on the readout.

Patronize the advertisers holding up their end of the Contact. And do the honorable thing: hold up your end.