Figaro and I are watching the Terry Jones series on the Crusades that came out eons ago. Figaro hasn’t read much about the Crusades before and I think he’s finding all the horrible stories especially disturbing – for me, what I have read before has all mixed up into a welter of dates, names and atrocities that are too gruesome to make the effort to remember in detail, and this series calls them back.
I don’t think it’s necessarily a failing that North Americans generally are incapable of thinking historically, that we don’t frame our selves and our experiences directly against a background of ancestors and tradition. Committed, rabid Jungian that I am, I believe a good, honest study of how one is in oneself and how that oneselfness must confront the world makes up for the stability lost from sacrificing old religions, old prescribed but reassuringly predictable gender roles, and safe, established life patterns. I think the intellectual and physical freedoms we’ve gained through such sacrifices make them well worth it.
I think what is a fairly specifically North American failing – especially an American failing, because their national identity cuts them off even more abruptly from their ancestral identity than the Canadian one – is not understanding most of the people in the world think far more historically than we do, because they live and breathe the consequences of history. For us, history is a pretty story of how we reached our present comfort and prosperity; for almost everyone else, it’s anything but. We can afford to ignore history in our daily lives, take it for granted, and other people can’t. And our great practical failing is mindlessly blaming other people for that inability instead of factoring it into how we work and negotiate with them, or how it plays into their relationship with each other.
The other day - coindentally, the day Figaro suggested renting the series - I met an old Dutch man who told me he was Jewish within five minutes. He seemed pretty nice, and had some stuff to say about things, and somehow - I think because of the flap over the Pope quoting some Byzantine over the violence inherent in Mohammed's message - the Crusades came up. He told me that the Crusades were about the rampant running of Muslims all through southern and eastern Europe, and started rapid fire talk when I tried to suggest they came about because of Peter-the-Hermit-type Christian fervour, the appeals of the Byzantine emperor, and the desire of some younger artistocratic sons to get property. I can't stand that - especially since he was about 70 and I can't find it in my heart to talk over 70 year olds. They remind me too much of my grandfather. Then I feel like I've got no balls.
My point is, if I was an idiot or if I hadn't received the education I had about the huge divisions of ethnicities and spheres of influence within the Muslim faith that rival those of the Christian faith, I probably would have bought what he was saying wholesale. When we - secular or "Jesus-loves-me-and-has-a-pointy-beard" type North Americans - look at Muslims through the filter of our media and the prominence of insane terrorists, we see one angry group who won't let go of ancestral grievances we don't understand or sympathize with, and no doubt having such a perception it would be reassuring to be told one of the ancestral grievances - the Crusades - Wasn't Your Fault.
Anyways. The series is okay. Kind of funny and sparks the urge to research, don’t you know. Alright if you don’t have a television but want to allow yourself an hour of video stimulation a night.
Now a nicer ancestral story. I was locking up my bike the other day when a limo driver with a thick accent who uses the dry cleaners next to my flat said hi and offered me a lift, as he always does. He sees some humour in offering a girl on a bike a ride in a limo. Heh. Anyways, then he asked me where I'm from, and when I told him he started talking in Italian! He was Ethiopian - you know, from that soveriegn country, the only soveriegn African country at the time, I think, that Mussolini's Italy invaded and annexed. My nonno worked there well into the second world war. I told him that, shook my head, and said Italy in Ethiopia was a "storia brutta"; he just shrugged, and said in perfect Canadianese, "Ah, whatayagonnado".
If only it were always that easy.
venerdì, settembre 22, 2006
giovedì, settembre 21, 2006
More television ranting
Would anyone like to make a sporting bet that Germaine Greer is kicking herself for unloading her vitriol on Steve Irwin’s barely-cold corpse when, if she had waited a matter of days, she could have laid into the critically injured body of Richard Hammond? Considering the macho tenor of his show Top Gear, she could have dressed such an attack up as feminism and so contributed something to the movement besides her recent call to pederasty. What a crop of boys being boys and tragedy ensuing we’ve been having for television lately.
The wildly popular show Hammond co-hosted for the BBC, Top Gear, is great television. For a feminist who doesn’t drive or have a television, it was a miracle of production genius that the twenty-seven objectified-Pirelli-Girl featuring minutes of a Top Gear I saw at a friend’s house meant anything to me, let alone entertained me. But it assuredly did. In some television contexts, long shots of beautifully pneumatic women interspersed with car assembly/racing/breathless semi-sexual description make sense.
Steve Irwin, unwatchable as I found him and hard as I laughed at South Park’s parody of his animal anal manipulations, also made television that made sense. Thousands of viewers developed a new relationship with the grosser, more forbidding animal species, which probably did conservation efforts some good. Top Gear, if anything, makes more sense. Exciting wet-dream cars and suggestions of the macho culture that goes along with them are interspersed with demonstrations of middle-class market models. The combination brings in a wide audience, including thousands of self-respecting women, who get useful consumer information and are amused in the process.
Despite Irwin’s and Hammond’s shows making sense and being helpful, good television, tragedy has struck twice in almost as many weeks. How? Who do we blame for what has happened to these men?
Media parasites like Greer crawled out of the woodwork to point the finger at the body when Irwin died and more will probably come out now. Irwin, the rant will run, died out of his own ambitious yobbishness, but at least he had a cause. Hammond, however, wasn’t helping anything except his own pocketbook, and in the process encouraged unsafe driving, dismissive representations of women – well, I’ll let the people who want to make such arguments think up more themselves. But if Hammond survives the accident, he will live to survive such censure.
Here’s the problem, though. Irwin and Hammond both had spectacularly stupid jobs and obviously made a poor decision in taking them, and the people who love them the most may have a hard time forgiving them for that. But we – the viewers, who enjoyed the context of their shows – we’re the ones who gave them their spectacularly stupid jobs. In a very practical, direct sense we pay the salaries for those jobs, because advertisers measure how much we watch such shows and buy ad time accordingly. Make no mistake. We aren’t television’s customers; we’re television’s commodity and at the same time its director.
One doesn't measure a television channel’s success by its number of viewers; one measures the quantity of ad revenue generated in an effort to reach viewers. Television networks make every effort to get huge numbers of viewers with specific spending patterns – those who are likely to travel abroad, for example, or those in the market for a new car. They go to absurd lengths coming up with the exact programming to please us and draw us in. They spend millions of dollars a year on hundreds of pilots they’ll discard overnight if it doesn’t engage the right demographic. Once the channel has the right viewers, it ‘sells’ them to the companies who purchase advertising time on their programmes.
Seen from that perspective – which, I assure you from industrial experience, is the perspective television executives and media buyers see it from – we the viewers are very powerful people. Powerful enough to give Steve Irwin and Richard Hammond the spectacularly stupid jobs that now cause their families so much pain. We enjoyed the events that led up to their tragedies the same way Romans enjoyed gladiatorial combat; we created the market that encouraged them to ever greater foolishness. But where the Romans took advantage of the gladiators’ slave status, we’ve taken advantage of Irwin’s and Hammond’s media ambitions and recklessness.
We haven’t stopped there. We watch reality shows by the dozen featuring progressively more outlandish or dangerous tasks performed by non-professionals. We scorn the people who appear on them and mock their obviously overweening desire for fame, but we give them that fame and so encourage others to chase it. First Irwin, now Hammond; inevitably someone will be seriously hurt or killed making one of the more extreme reality shows and no doubt we’ll be quick to condemn them for their own tragedy too. And probably have to hear to what Germaine Bloody Greer thinks she has to say about it.
Alternatively, we could embrace the power that we have over the television market and stop using it for cheap vicarious thrills. But then we might have to, god forbid, read a book or talk to our loved ones or something while network executives desperately search for something to broadcast that doesn’t involve people being seriously hurt or worse. In the meantime, we could do the families of Irwin and Hammond a favour by thinking of the pain they’re going through and not loudly blaming their men for the tragedies our voyeurism pushed them to.
The wildly popular show Hammond co-hosted for the BBC, Top Gear, is great television. For a feminist who doesn’t drive or have a television, it was a miracle of production genius that the twenty-seven objectified-Pirelli-Girl featuring minutes of a Top Gear I saw at a friend’s house meant anything to me, let alone entertained me. But it assuredly did. In some television contexts, long shots of beautifully pneumatic women interspersed with car assembly/racing/breathless semi-sexual description make sense.
Steve Irwin, unwatchable as I found him and hard as I laughed at South Park’s parody of his animal anal manipulations, also made television that made sense. Thousands of viewers developed a new relationship with the grosser, more forbidding animal species, which probably did conservation efforts some good. Top Gear, if anything, makes more sense. Exciting wet-dream cars and suggestions of the macho culture that goes along with them are interspersed with demonstrations of middle-class market models. The combination brings in a wide audience, including thousands of self-respecting women, who get useful consumer information and are amused in the process.
Despite Irwin’s and Hammond’s shows making sense and being helpful, good television, tragedy has struck twice in almost as many weeks. How? Who do we blame for what has happened to these men?
Media parasites like Greer crawled out of the woodwork to point the finger at the body when Irwin died and more will probably come out now. Irwin, the rant will run, died out of his own ambitious yobbishness, but at least he had a cause. Hammond, however, wasn’t helping anything except his own pocketbook, and in the process encouraged unsafe driving, dismissive representations of women – well, I’ll let the people who want to make such arguments think up more themselves. But if Hammond survives the accident, he will live to survive such censure.
Here’s the problem, though. Irwin and Hammond both had spectacularly stupid jobs and obviously made a poor decision in taking them, and the people who love them the most may have a hard time forgiving them for that. But we – the viewers, who enjoyed the context of their shows – we’re the ones who gave them their spectacularly stupid jobs. In a very practical, direct sense we pay the salaries for those jobs, because advertisers measure how much we watch such shows and buy ad time accordingly. Make no mistake. We aren’t television’s customers; we’re television’s commodity and at the same time its director.
One doesn't measure a television channel’s success by its number of viewers; one measures the quantity of ad revenue generated in an effort to reach viewers. Television networks make every effort to get huge numbers of viewers with specific spending patterns – those who are likely to travel abroad, for example, or those in the market for a new car. They go to absurd lengths coming up with the exact programming to please us and draw us in. They spend millions of dollars a year on hundreds of pilots they’ll discard overnight if it doesn’t engage the right demographic. Once the channel has the right viewers, it ‘sells’ them to the companies who purchase advertising time on their programmes.
Seen from that perspective – which, I assure you from industrial experience, is the perspective television executives and media buyers see it from – we the viewers are very powerful people. Powerful enough to give Steve Irwin and Richard Hammond the spectacularly stupid jobs that now cause their families so much pain. We enjoyed the events that led up to their tragedies the same way Romans enjoyed gladiatorial combat; we created the market that encouraged them to ever greater foolishness. But where the Romans took advantage of the gladiators’ slave status, we’ve taken advantage of Irwin’s and Hammond’s media ambitions and recklessness.
We haven’t stopped there. We watch reality shows by the dozen featuring progressively more outlandish or dangerous tasks performed by non-professionals. We scorn the people who appear on them and mock their obviously overweening desire for fame, but we give them that fame and so encourage others to chase it. First Irwin, now Hammond; inevitably someone will be seriously hurt or killed making one of the more extreme reality shows and no doubt we’ll be quick to condemn them for their own tragedy too. And probably have to hear to what Germaine Bloody Greer thinks she has to say about it.
Alternatively, we could embrace the power that we have over the television market and stop using it for cheap vicarious thrills. But then we might have to, god forbid, read a book or talk to our loved ones or something while network executives desperately search for something to broadcast that doesn’t involve people being seriously hurt or worse. In the meantime, we could do the families of Irwin and Hammond a favour by thinking of the pain they’re going through and not loudly blaming their men for the tragedies our voyeurism pushed them to.
mercoledì, settembre 20, 2006
Napalm in the morning
Fuck, I'm pissed off. Yesterday’s conference was awful in its repetitious quality. Maybe I went too soon after reading Brave New World. Like all of them always are, it was about Engagement – Audience Engagement, that is, and how to both measure it and create it. That’s pretty self-explanatory, right? Advertisers want a way to figure out how much money should be payed for such and such an ad’s ability to create an emotional or ‘engaging’ relationship between a potential consumer and a potential buy – that is, a relationship ‘engaging’ enough that the viewer will go out and buy the product advertised.
People don’t shut their bloody faces about this because television advertising used to work (and still works to a certain degree) on the Reach and Response model. That is, advertisers pay for the number of people they think they are showing their ads to by advertising on such-and-such a channel at such-and-such a time (which is why we have things like Nielsen ratings to measure show’s viewership), and in an airy-fairy hypothetical type way for the number of people who will probably go out and buy the product.
Obviously the Reach and Response model has some big problems. It was invented back in the 1950’s, when you could ‘reach’ 85% of the North American market by advertising on a total of three shows. Now even basic cable packages offer such a plethora of themed choice that audiences have become segmented, particular, grouped in new ways.
And this is what is getting people’s nipples in a twist about Engagement. For media buyer types its important because it’s just common sense that advertisers are going to push for new buying models now – wanting to advertise during a particular show, for example, rather than a particular time slot, making things like sponsorship and aggressive product placement more important.
What’s driving me to distraction is the degree to which Engagement is being taken over the top by both advertising creatives and executives – creatives because they want to build a special media identity for the brand they’re advertising, and executives so that they can find a flattering measure letting clients know how great the ad is and how many millions upon millions of dollars the advertising agency deserves for making it. The problem with both takes-over-the-top, the big fucking rabid elephant in the room that’s steadfastly ignored at all these fucking conferences, is that advertising probably doesn’t work that well, or certainly not in this ‘engagement’ sense.
Consumers buy products because something sets that product apart from competing brands and makes it unique; be it the appearance, the functionality, a low price, ease of access, or things like that. Red Bull’s ‘guerrilla marketing’ campaign, which everyone is always jizzing themselves over, had the effect of making Red Bull a lot more accessible than most energy drinks at the time it was launched. iPods, something else they won’t shut the fuck up about in terms of the marketing behind it, made programming a huge tracklist an absolute piece of piss that anyone picking up the highest-memory device could figure out in 45 seconds.
The idea behind engagement is to make the product unique through clever, targeted marketing that creates a ‘unique’ emotional connection between the potential consumer and the brand being advertised. It assumes consumers are stupid enough and superficial enough to allow an advertising experience to morph into some sort of love or loyalty for a product. It, to paraphrase Figaro’s summation when I whined at him endlessly last night about what a wicked, parasitic and unnecessary industry I’m analysing for, assumes you can package turds well enough and make people think they need them.
I’m a misanthrope and I think the worst of everybody, but I don’t think that’s true. Which annoys me, because it means that our society invests millions of dollars and thousands of white-collar college grads in an industry that is essentially a wasteful exercise in disrespect. At this point the advertising juggernaut has become a self-perpetuating industry, like the arms industry, and while the results haven’t been so spectacularly inhuman there’s certainly a sickly dehumanizing element to it that has filled me with fury.
Ah, fury, better than coffee at waking me up.
People don’t shut their bloody faces about this because television advertising used to work (and still works to a certain degree) on the Reach and Response model. That is, advertisers pay for the number of people they think they are showing their ads to by advertising on such-and-such a channel at such-and-such a time (which is why we have things like Nielsen ratings to measure show’s viewership), and in an airy-fairy hypothetical type way for the number of people who will probably go out and buy the product.
Obviously the Reach and Response model has some big problems. It was invented back in the 1950’s, when you could ‘reach’ 85% of the North American market by advertising on a total of three shows. Now even basic cable packages offer such a plethora of themed choice that audiences have become segmented, particular, grouped in new ways.
And this is what is getting people’s nipples in a twist about Engagement. For media buyer types its important because it’s just common sense that advertisers are going to push for new buying models now – wanting to advertise during a particular show, for example, rather than a particular time slot, making things like sponsorship and aggressive product placement more important.
What’s driving me to distraction is the degree to which Engagement is being taken over the top by both advertising creatives and executives – creatives because they want to build a special media identity for the brand they’re advertising, and executives so that they can find a flattering measure letting clients know how great the ad is and how many millions upon millions of dollars the advertising agency deserves for making it. The problem with both takes-over-the-top, the big fucking rabid elephant in the room that’s steadfastly ignored at all these fucking conferences, is that advertising probably doesn’t work that well, or certainly not in this ‘engagement’ sense.
Consumers buy products because something sets that product apart from competing brands and makes it unique; be it the appearance, the functionality, a low price, ease of access, or things like that. Red Bull’s ‘guerrilla marketing’ campaign, which everyone is always jizzing themselves over, had the effect of making Red Bull a lot more accessible than most energy drinks at the time it was launched. iPods, something else they won’t shut the fuck up about in terms of the marketing behind it, made programming a huge tracklist an absolute piece of piss that anyone picking up the highest-memory device could figure out in 45 seconds.
The idea behind engagement is to make the product unique through clever, targeted marketing that creates a ‘unique’ emotional connection between the potential consumer and the brand being advertised. It assumes consumers are stupid enough and superficial enough to allow an advertising experience to morph into some sort of love or loyalty for a product. It, to paraphrase Figaro’s summation when I whined at him endlessly last night about what a wicked, parasitic and unnecessary industry I’m analysing for, assumes you can package turds well enough and make people think they need them.
I’m a misanthrope and I think the worst of everybody, but I don’t think that’s true. Which annoys me, because it means that our society invests millions of dollars and thousands of white-collar college grads in an industry that is essentially a wasteful exercise in disrespect. At this point the advertising juggernaut has become a self-perpetuating industry, like the arms industry, and while the results haven’t been so spectacularly inhuman there’s certainly a sickly dehumanizing element to it that has filled me with fury.
Ah, fury, better than coffee at waking me up.
martedì, settembre 19, 2006
Conference THIS, baby
Must dash to some dumbfuck conference today. So I’m cheating and directing you to a Brazilian Girls review I wrote elsewhere. Yeah, as if the people who read this blog lack anything substantive to read and their mornings are going to be ruined without a minimum of 300 words that come out of my head.
To make up for the awesomeness of the latest Brazilian Girls album in the great equilibriating pissing competition between yin and yang that is life, I’m reading a book I fear may be crap. End of the Line, by Barry C. Lynn. I’m sorry, if I want emotion from my books I’ll read a novel with first person narration written by someone with a far better style, or possibly I'll read Steiglitz. The subject, the frailty of our globalized economy, is sober enough but the delivery is whiny and ridiculously emotive – I keep expecting him to write phrases like “curse that naughty old Willie Clinton and his sneaky ways”.
I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and finish it, though, if nothing else it’ll teach me not to get my book reccomendations from the Wall Street Journal. Viva the Economist Books & Arts section! And yes, the Guardian. The Guardian also reccommends good books. Serious.
To make up for the awesomeness of the latest Brazilian Girls album in the great equilibriating pissing competition between yin and yang that is life, I’m reading a book I fear may be crap. End of the Line, by Barry C. Lynn. I’m sorry, if I want emotion from my books I’ll read a novel with first person narration written by someone with a far better style, or possibly I'll read Steiglitz. The subject, the frailty of our globalized economy, is sober enough but the delivery is whiny and ridiculously emotive – I keep expecting him to write phrases like “curse that naughty old Willie Clinton and his sneaky ways”.
I’ll give it the benefit of the doubt and finish it, though, if nothing else it’ll teach me not to get my book reccomendations from the Wall Street Journal. Viva the Economist Books & Arts section! And yes, the Guardian. The Guardian also reccommends good books. Serious.
lunedì, settembre 18, 2006
La rentrée
What a lovely weekend. It feels as though I’m coming back from a holiday this morning, which is good as next weekend will be my undergraduate reunion – I think I’ll enjoy it but it won’t be particularly restful – and the week after that I’m going to England, and both of those things will be far away from my sweetheart.
Last night was the final Music Garden concert of the year, and maybe the final one altogether if the Island aeroport expansion goes through. I shall miss them, if that’s the case, or I would if I was planning on staying in Toronto. So idyllic, last night, seeing the Kirby Quartet in front of a sunny clump of flowers, variously gentle and thrilling strains of Beethoven, Britten amd Purcell while bees and butterflies drank.
At the same time I’m not sold on the idea of pushing aeroports and flights constantly out to the ‘burbs, especially when the GTA has to give up so much of its tax revenue for crappier regions in Ontario and apparently can’t afford to improve the dismal transportation links to Pearson. But then the proposed expansion is totally half-ass and will probably just involve more Montréal flights, as if that investment wouldn’t be better made and cleaner getting us some TGVs. If I were in charge of everything, wouldn’t the world be lovely? Yes. Yes it would.
Speaking of which, I read A Brave New World this weekend. What a brainfuck. You should read it if you haven’t – everybody should. I wonder what the narrative would have been like if Huxley had had the balls to make the Savage a pure Savage, and not the traumatized child of a normal Englishwoman who was marginalized in the native community because of her sluttiness, but, you know, who the fuck cares. That book is wow.
Last night was the final Music Garden concert of the year, and maybe the final one altogether if the Island aeroport expansion goes through. I shall miss them, if that’s the case, or I would if I was planning on staying in Toronto. So idyllic, last night, seeing the Kirby Quartet in front of a sunny clump of flowers, variously gentle and thrilling strains of Beethoven, Britten amd Purcell while bees and butterflies drank.
At the same time I’m not sold on the idea of pushing aeroports and flights constantly out to the ‘burbs, especially when the GTA has to give up so much of its tax revenue for crappier regions in Ontario and apparently can’t afford to improve the dismal transportation links to Pearson. But then the proposed expansion is totally half-ass and will probably just involve more Montréal flights, as if that investment wouldn’t be better made and cleaner getting us some TGVs. If I were in charge of everything, wouldn’t the world be lovely? Yes. Yes it would.
Speaking of which, I read A Brave New World this weekend. What a brainfuck. You should read it if you haven’t – everybody should. I wonder what the narrative would have been like if Huxley had had the balls to make the Savage a pure Savage, and not the traumatized child of a normal Englishwoman who was marginalized in the native community because of her sluttiness, but, you know, who the fuck cares. That book is wow.
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