Advertising 101 Part 1
Diversity and inclusion bring us together...
Reach is a marketing/advertising industry term. When discussed by advertisers and their agency proxies it determines how and where to reach prospective customers. When measured it describes how many prospective customers your marketing and/or ad message reaches.
Back in the early days of radio and TV and great metro daily newspapers, reach was the dominant metric by which those who owned the radio and TV stations and great metro dailies got paid by the advertisers who wanted to reach listeners, viewers, and readers.
The mechanics of mass reach are simple enough: increase the installed base of readers, listeners, and/or viewers while limiting the number of things they can read, listen to, or view. That’s why the great metro dailies along with the radio and TV networks were so powerful through the first eight decades of the 20th century: they were big fish in big urban ponds. Big installed bases of readers, listeners, and viewers in big metro markets with only a few options for readers, listeners, and viewers per market. Voila: mass reach!
When asked, most reporters will tell you, “I’m in the news business.” But they’re not. Reporters are in the ad business. Their jobs may be to report the news (or some facsimile thereof). But make no mistake: they’re in the ad sales business. Ad-supported programming is a self-serving ad industry myth designed to obscure the fact that the ads aren’t there to support the programs at all. The programs are there to support the ads.
Brought to you by Pfizer doesn’t accurately describe Pfizer’s true role — as the guys and gals who pay the bills — at the top of the ad biz food chain. Brought to you by Pfizer is in fact a conscious misdirect to describe a commercial model whose true function is not to bring the program to you but to bring you to Pfizer. Brought to you by Pfizer more accurately describes the function of the program, not the ad.
Thus, jocular overweight people singing and dancing in the Jardiance town square don’t support the news. They are the news — at least the only news that matters to the folks who pay the freight. The convivial Poop-in-a-Box character who shows up like an uninvited relative to extol the benefits of Cologuard doesn’t support the news. He is the news — at least the only news that matters to the guys and gals who pay to keep the lights on in the newsroom. “Walk with me, Mr. Poop-in-a Box…”
Ad-supported programming is, in reality, program-supported advertising. And thus the only real question of interest for advertisers is, “What are all these fuckin’ programs doing between my ads?”
So the first rule of both consumer and media literacy is this: Be skeptical of any product sold to you by anyone who doesn’t even know what business they’re in. Especially the news.
And now, as an object lesson in self-referential grandeur, I quote from my essay…
While the Jews had dominated much of American entertainment and popular culture through the first half of the twentieth century, commercial advertising in the age of television took over in the second half. Network TV and the commercial ad model teamed up to become the great American social and cultural engine, powered by many trillions of ad dollars (you read that right) over the ensuing decades. As one might expect, such a hefty investment in such a potent cultural mechanism was not without consequences, good and bad.
Two of the more obvious consequences are inclusivity and diversity, the natural byproducts of an all-powerful and all-embracing commercial advertising model charged with the default imperatives to saturate existing markets and open new ones. No mistake, therefore, that the popular sitcoms of the 1950s and 60s — shows like Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best, The Andy Griffith Show and The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet — reflected the white middle-class demographic composition of the first mass target audience for TV. Once the white middle-class audience was saturated, however, the commercial advertising model — ever insatiable and predatory — turned elsewhere in search of fresh meat.
Accordingly (and thanks in no small measure to the social unrest and liberation movements of the 1960s), sitcoms shifted from the largely patriarchal and lily-white suburban themes of the 1950s and 60s to more urban themes with color and gender diversity — like All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Maude, Chico and the Man, Sanford and Son, and The Jeffersons — in the 1970s. Concurrent with the above, the internal demographics of the big advertisers themselves also changed as more women and more people of color entered the workforce in significant numbers. Hence, the commercial advertising and programming produced by Facebook, Google, Apple, Hulu, Netflix and Amazon today reflect not only the sensibilities and hyper-sensitivities of their millennial SJW audience, but the sensibilities and hyper-sensitivities of the SJWs who populate and patrol their corporate campuses as well.
Through it all, disingenuous advertisers and TV executives have insisted that they are only responding to the programming demands of consumers in a consumer society. But consumer demand has always been a self-serving media and ad industry canard, especially transparent in the age of billion-dollar advertising budgets and trillion-dollar ad networks. In truth, the commercial media industry is all powerful and utterly rapacious. Those who run it and are paid to work in it don’t respond to consumer demand. They manufacture it.
Yes, while diversity and inclusion — the paradigmatic demigods of social justice today — may have found populist voices in the liberation movements of the 1960s, they came of age over the next few decades in the bowels of Madison Avenue as the privileged creations of mass market reach paid for by trillions of ad dollars (again, you read that right). In fact, diversity and inclusion were bought and paid for long before they became the shopworn mottos of 21st-century Wokeism.
Television was the mass reach medium that brought us the civil rights marches in Selma and Birmingham. Television brought the Viet Nam War into our living rooms. Television brought us the anti-war marches and 1968 DNC riots in Chicago. Television brought us the moon landing and Woodstock and the Miracle Mets in the summer of 1969. Television brought us Tiananmen Square and the Fall of the Iron Curtain two decades later. Throughout the second half of the 20th century, television — courtesy of a mass reach commercial ad model powered by trillions of dollars — galvanized and more often than not — unified us.
By the mid-1990s, however, the mass reach model was in decline. The introductions of the electronic spreadsheet and cable TV in the 1980s forever changed agency billing and vernacular. The primacy of mass reach advertising on behemoth broadcast networks was replaced by the presumed efficacy of targeted advertising across an exploding universe of demographically and psychographically diverse cable channels. And then came the Internet…
The addiction thing.
Fast Eddie Bernays sauce is full of hooks reaching out to touch velcromagnon wo/man loops for the "you complete me" & "you had me at hello" Jerry McGuire manifesto destiny / couch close.
And so convenient. No buttons or laces or zippers. "We'll have you out of & back into those garments in a jiffy."
Segmentation illusions. A few heads attached to millipede/estrial chainlink fences of stolen emptied of calories goods.
The obsolescence-fraud is planned & it is televised so it can't be a revolution ... of the gerbil-wheel.
"A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's heaven for?" Robert Browning obviously wasn't thinking about advertising of marketing.