Tweet
EJ recently commented on his return from Europe that American television news was nothing but one large infomercial....here's one examination of that patient.
Advertising and the Media
The most visible manifestation of advertising is in the media system. On the one hand, advertising itself is one of the primary forms of content in the media. It is ubiquitous. On the other hand, it is the primary means of support for much of the commercial media, and almost all of the news media, to the point that the press can be regarded as a necessary part of the broader advertising industry. Let’s be clear: media would have emerged as major industries in the United States even without the assistance of advertising; motion pictures, recorded music, and book publishing come to mind. In the nineteenth century capitalist media existed but were a relatively small aspect of cultural production. With the regime of big business and advertising, communication empires flourished, first with the great newspaper chains, then with the broadcast networks and eventually with the contemporary transnational media conglomerate. Fueled by advertising, the media sector became a major area of economic activity and a source of tremendous profitability.
Defenders of the commercial media system applaud advertising for permitting the system to prosper without direct state support and political independence. Behind this veil of “freedom of the press,” however, lies the fact that capitalist ownership and advertising support have made the U.S. media system (and U.S. society as a whole) decidedly less democratic than it would have been the case under other institutional structures. Volumes of research have demonstrated the nefarious influence of advertising over news, entertainment, and cultural fare. According to Baran and Sweezy, “the argument sometimes advanced in favor of advertising, that it enables the media to finance the production of high-quality musical and literary programs, is on a level with burning down the house in order to roast the pig.”
In the case of journalism, the implications of advertising for content were widely understood as cancerous almost from the beginning of the monopoly capital era. If newspaper owners received their revenues from advertisers there would be tremendous incentive for them to doctor the news to satisfy their benefactors to the detriment of the public. This is one of the major reasons why professional journalism emerged in the first half of the twentieth century as the “solution” to the problem of capitalist news media supported by advertising. The principle of professional journalism was that it would erect a “Chinese Wall” between the editors and reporters on one hand and the owners and the advertisers on the other hand. Therefore the public could trust the content of the news and not be concerned by monopoly ownership or the omnipresent advertising in the media. Although professional journalism has its merits, it has hardly been a politically neutral enterprise. It has, instead, tended to internalize the dominant values and make journalists oblivious to them as they go about their work. In the media as elsewhere, despite the aura of professionalism, he who pays the piper ultimately calls the tune.
Nowhere are the contradictions of advertising-supported journalism more pernicious than in coverage of economics and capitalism. As news media rely largely upon advertising for revenues, and as advertisers are primarily interested in affluent consumers, journalism has gravitated to an out-and-out rah-rah attitude with nary a critical bone in its being.
The problem has only been aggravated over time. As recently as 1950, there were several hundred full-time labor reporters and editors at U.S. daily newspapers; by the end of the twentieth century there were barely any. Concurrently, “business news” was the fastest-growing area in the field.
Business news has been pretty much a farce in the journalism department. Our news media missed the corporate scandals entirely, cheering on the debt bubbles in the midst of their mad worship of wealth. Today they are mostly asleep to the machinations of finance capital to have the Treasury and Federal Reserve shift public monies to their coffers, while trivial stories get widespread attention. The lesson is clear: a privately owned and advertising-supported media system is structurally incapable of providing an honest picture of the economy, and is therefore inadequate for a democratic society.
In the current depression, and with the emergence of the Internet, corporate media, and particularly news media, are floundering as advertising revenues are in sharp retreat. There are grounds to believe advertising will never return to “old media.” It is unclear how well advertising will adapt to the Internet; there is little reason at present to believe that ad money will ever flood cyberspace to anywhere near the same extent it bankrolled newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. To some observers, the traditional sales model no longer works and will be junked. We will move on to a cleaner and more efficient market model for consumer information. Good-bye Rosser Reeves.
This perspective, in our view, is wrong-headed. Corporations were never wedded to advertising per se; it has simply been the most economically efficient way by far to engage in the sales effort. With the decline of the traditional advertising-media model, the need for the sales effort remains as powerful as ever, it only assumes new forms. What Thorstein Veblen called the progressive “blurring” of the relationship “between workmanship and salesmanship,” characteristic of monopoly capitalism, is likely to become even more the case within communications, as traditional advertising declines. The main tendency in media, traditional and digital, has been for the elimination of the long-standing barrier between editorial content and advertising. They are increasingly merging, with ignominious implications for media content.
The “infomercial” is an obscene example, as is the now common corporate sponsorship of once noncommercial public activities. But the latest developments are far more sophisticated. It is the complete elimination of the barrier between the advertising pitch and the actual sale. CBS founder William Paley once said that television was the ideal selling medium. Left to Madison Avenue, the interactive digital world will be the ideal medium for closing the deal altogether. As media, digital or otherwise, seek revenues from commercial interests, they will adapt whatever standards generate maximum profits. Indications are that the standards for editorial integrity will be low.
Another related tendency has been for explicit advertising to become a smaller portion of the sales effort than it has been in the past. Because non-advertising marketing expenses are not statistically tracked with a uniform standard and are often buried in other categories, this is a difficult argument to make with desired precision. But all evidence we encounter points in the direction of the sales effort continuing to grow while traditional advertising plays a smaller role. Advertising has grown, but now accounts, according to most informed industry estimates, for at most 30 percent of marketing, and the advertising share is still diminishing. Such estimates, moreover, consider only advertising, sales promotion, and direct marketing, not encompassing total marketing expenditures.
The huge growth is in direct marketing. This refers to telemarketing, e-mail marketing, junk mail, and various and sundry other methods to sell without affixing the pitch to noncommercial media content of some kind. At current rates, direct marketing, which was minuscule compared to advertising just two decades ago, will account for more corporate spending than advertising itself within a few years.
If the assumptions of recent industrial research hold true, and advertising is now at most 30 percent of total marketing, then the amount of marketing in the economy would account for roughly 5.5 percent of GDP in 2007. As the present study uses only quantifiable categories, and does not include the marketing expenses hard-wired into production or other categories, this can be regarded as a very conservative estimate.
In this light, we are hardly entering an era in which the contradictions of the sales effort are in remission or decline, but rather, one in which they are spreading like a virus. If anything, the sales effort is ever more desperate to imprint itself on our brains, and any ethical standards are in an uphill battle for survival. It is striking that among the fastest growing sectors of marketing over the past three decades are prescription drug marketing and marketing to children. In the pharmaceutical industry annual spending on direct-to-consumer advertising and promotions to health professionals (including free samples) rose from 14.2 percent of total sales in 1996 to 18.2 percent of total sales in 2005. Real expenditures on direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing increased by 330 percent over the period. In 1983 corporations spent $100 million a year marketing to kids. By 2007 this had risen to nearly $17 billion.
Both of these areas were considered more or less off-limits to advertising for decades, or at least strictly regulated. The notion that pharmaceuticals would be promoted by persuasive advertising campaigns or that an avalanche of advertising would be directed at children was once considered dubious, if not obscene. Today it is business as usual.
Inger L. Stole, & Hannah Holleman
Advertising and the Media
The most visible manifestation of advertising is in the media system. On the one hand, advertising itself is one of the primary forms of content in the media. It is ubiquitous. On the other hand, it is the primary means of support for much of the commercial media, and almost all of the news media, to the point that the press can be regarded as a necessary part of the broader advertising industry. Let’s be clear: media would have emerged as major industries in the United States even without the assistance of advertising; motion pictures, recorded music, and book publishing come to mind. In the nineteenth century capitalist media existed but were a relatively small aspect of cultural production. With the regime of big business and advertising, communication empires flourished, first with the great newspaper chains, then with the broadcast networks and eventually with the contemporary transnational media conglomerate. Fueled by advertising, the media sector became a major area of economic activity and a source of tremendous profitability.
Defenders of the commercial media system applaud advertising for permitting the system to prosper without direct state support and political independence. Behind this veil of “freedom of the press,” however, lies the fact that capitalist ownership and advertising support have made the U.S. media system (and U.S. society as a whole) decidedly less democratic than it would have been the case under other institutional structures. Volumes of research have demonstrated the nefarious influence of advertising over news, entertainment, and cultural fare. According to Baran and Sweezy, “the argument sometimes advanced in favor of advertising, that it enables the media to finance the production of high-quality musical and literary programs, is on a level with burning down the house in order to roast the pig.”
In the case of journalism, the implications of advertising for content were widely understood as cancerous almost from the beginning of the monopoly capital era. If newspaper owners received their revenues from advertisers there would be tremendous incentive for them to doctor the news to satisfy their benefactors to the detriment of the public. This is one of the major reasons why professional journalism emerged in the first half of the twentieth century as the “solution” to the problem of capitalist news media supported by advertising. The principle of professional journalism was that it would erect a “Chinese Wall” between the editors and reporters on one hand and the owners and the advertisers on the other hand. Therefore the public could trust the content of the news and not be concerned by monopoly ownership or the omnipresent advertising in the media. Although professional journalism has its merits, it has hardly been a politically neutral enterprise. It has, instead, tended to internalize the dominant values and make journalists oblivious to them as they go about their work. In the media as elsewhere, despite the aura of professionalism, he who pays the piper ultimately calls the tune.
Nowhere are the contradictions of advertising-supported journalism more pernicious than in coverage of economics and capitalism. As news media rely largely upon advertising for revenues, and as advertisers are primarily interested in affluent consumers, journalism has gravitated to an out-and-out rah-rah attitude with nary a critical bone in its being.
The problem has only been aggravated over time. As recently as 1950, there were several hundred full-time labor reporters and editors at U.S. daily newspapers; by the end of the twentieth century there were barely any. Concurrently, “business news” was the fastest-growing area in the field.
Business news has been pretty much a farce in the journalism department. Our news media missed the corporate scandals entirely, cheering on the debt bubbles in the midst of their mad worship of wealth. Today they are mostly asleep to the machinations of finance capital to have the Treasury and Federal Reserve shift public monies to their coffers, while trivial stories get widespread attention. The lesson is clear: a privately owned and advertising-supported media system is structurally incapable of providing an honest picture of the economy, and is therefore inadequate for a democratic society.
In the current depression, and with the emergence of the Internet, corporate media, and particularly news media, are floundering as advertising revenues are in sharp retreat. There are grounds to believe advertising will never return to “old media.” It is unclear how well advertising will adapt to the Internet; there is little reason at present to believe that ad money will ever flood cyberspace to anywhere near the same extent it bankrolled newspapers, magazines, radio, and television. To some observers, the traditional sales model no longer works and will be junked. We will move on to a cleaner and more efficient market model for consumer information. Good-bye Rosser Reeves.
This perspective, in our view, is wrong-headed. Corporations were never wedded to advertising per se; it has simply been the most economically efficient way by far to engage in the sales effort. With the decline of the traditional advertising-media model, the need for the sales effort remains as powerful as ever, it only assumes new forms. What Thorstein Veblen called the progressive “blurring” of the relationship “between workmanship and salesmanship,” characteristic of monopoly capitalism, is likely to become even more the case within communications, as traditional advertising declines. The main tendency in media, traditional and digital, has been for the elimination of the long-standing barrier between editorial content and advertising. They are increasingly merging, with ignominious implications for media content.
The “infomercial” is an obscene example, as is the now common corporate sponsorship of once noncommercial public activities. But the latest developments are far more sophisticated. It is the complete elimination of the barrier between the advertising pitch and the actual sale. CBS founder William Paley once said that television was the ideal selling medium. Left to Madison Avenue, the interactive digital world will be the ideal medium for closing the deal altogether. As media, digital or otherwise, seek revenues from commercial interests, they will adapt whatever standards generate maximum profits. Indications are that the standards for editorial integrity will be low.
Another related tendency has been for explicit advertising to become a smaller portion of the sales effort than it has been in the past. Because non-advertising marketing expenses are not statistically tracked with a uniform standard and are often buried in other categories, this is a difficult argument to make with desired precision. But all evidence we encounter points in the direction of the sales effort continuing to grow while traditional advertising plays a smaller role. Advertising has grown, but now accounts, according to most informed industry estimates, for at most 30 percent of marketing, and the advertising share is still diminishing. Such estimates, moreover, consider only advertising, sales promotion, and direct marketing, not encompassing total marketing expenditures.
The huge growth is in direct marketing. This refers to telemarketing, e-mail marketing, junk mail, and various and sundry other methods to sell without affixing the pitch to noncommercial media content of some kind. At current rates, direct marketing, which was minuscule compared to advertising just two decades ago, will account for more corporate spending than advertising itself within a few years.
If the assumptions of recent industrial research hold true, and advertising is now at most 30 percent of total marketing, then the amount of marketing in the economy would account for roughly 5.5 percent of GDP in 2007. As the present study uses only quantifiable categories, and does not include the marketing expenses hard-wired into production or other categories, this can be regarded as a very conservative estimate.
In this light, we are hardly entering an era in which the contradictions of the sales effort are in remission or decline, but rather, one in which they are spreading like a virus. If anything, the sales effort is ever more desperate to imprint itself on our brains, and any ethical standards are in an uphill battle for survival. It is striking that among the fastest growing sectors of marketing over the past three decades are prescription drug marketing and marketing to children. In the pharmaceutical industry annual spending on direct-to-consumer advertising and promotions to health professionals (including free samples) rose from 14.2 percent of total sales in 1996 to 18.2 percent of total sales in 2005. Real expenditures on direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical marketing increased by 330 percent over the period. In 1983 corporations spent $100 million a year marketing to kids. By 2007 this had risen to nearly $17 billion.
Both of these areas were considered more or less off-limits to advertising for decades, or at least strictly regulated. The notion that pharmaceuticals would be promoted by persuasive advertising campaigns or that an avalanche of advertising would be directed at children was once considered dubious, if not obscene. Today it is business as usual.
Inger L. Stole, & Hannah Holleman
Comment