the Tube in VL

[Doug Millison]

The fragmentation of mass media audiences into smaller niche 
audiences -- through the proliferation of TV channels, the Internet, 
etc. -- would seem to reduce the power of advertising.  I don't think 
this has reduced the grip of corporate-controlled media on audiences, 
however.  With more choices, and choices more finely tuned to niche 
market interests, overall audience participation in 
corporate-controlled media, and thus their exposure to advertising, 
marketing, and promotional messages, would seem to be on the increase.

Advertisers have  found many creative ways to aggregate audiences and 
thus fight the fragmentation trend. Huge companies (they're getting 
bigger all the time through mergers and acquisitions, and their reach 
extends through globalization) have the budgets to buy advertising 
and disseminate well-orchestrated promotional and marketing campaigns 
across multiple media.  Flip channels on your cable TV system at 
dinner time and see how many different channels offer the same 
McDonald's advertisement in the same time slot; you won't likely 
escape the same marketing messages by logging on to the Internet, 
either, as consumer-oriented Web sites get in on the act with ad 
banners and sponsored editorial features. Leave the TV, computer, and 
radio behind -- but advertisements and branding programs  are now 
woven into the fabric of daily existence to an unprecedented degree, 
yesterday's billboards seem almost quaint compared to the spread of 
corporate logos and product/service branding messages throughout the 
built environment, in sponsored events, in the spread of retail 
franchises (Starbucks, etc.), cross-promotions among companies or 
among brands of one company, and lots more.

Such advertising and promotional programs are made possible by 
increasingly large media and publishing companies, which continue to 
consolidate (and thus integrate TV, radio, newspapers, books, 
magazines, Internet, events, etc., under one, efficient, umbrella 
corporate structure) and offer advertisers comprehensive and 
far-reaching opportunites to pump marketing messages through 
multiple-media channels simultaneously.  Product placements in films 
and TV programs (as well as in newspaper, magazine, and Internet 
"content" a.k.a. editorial material) have reached new heights. 
Moving beyond promotion through the use of commercial products and 
services as prizes on game shows, the games themselves now include 
advertising/promotional content -- questions about commercial 
products, and especially about other media products and services in 
quiz shows like Jeopardy, for example; you see similar infiltration 
of advertising messages into editorial and programming in all media.

This kind of corporate intrusion into our lives will only get worse, 
as media consolidation continues and as the Networked Economy (the 
sum total of corporate activity on the Internet and related media; I 
describe it, and how to manipulate it for profit, in considerable 
detail in a book -- a how-to manual from the dark-side --  I've just 
co-written, to be published in August; details at my Web site if 
anybody has an interest) integrates more of today's flesh-world 
economy.

Perhaps sales per ad dollar are down, I don't have numbers handy, but 
that would only reflect a rather narrow measure of investment. 
Increasingly, marketers  invest in  promotional programs that lead 
consumers into long-term relationships (frequent flyer or buyer and 
other loyalty programs, to name one example), through advertising and 
promotional campaigns designed to meet exigencies of the marketer's 
return-on-investment spreadsheet calculations, and which use 
increasingly sophisticated design and narrative strategies to invest 
consumers in brands on an ever-more intimate level.  Over the long 
term, they get more bang for the buck, even if this particular ad in 
this particular medium, returns less.

So, I don't think the evolution of TV content vitiates Pynchon's 
critique of same in Vineland. Judging from P's remarks in the intro 
to Stone Junction, where he goes on about the danger to civil 
liberties inherent in the Internet,  (only a personal opinion here of 
course) I doubt that he applauds the spread of corporate marketing on 
the Internet.

Vineland is prescient precisely because -- as the quotes rj strung 
together show -- Pynchon  shows TV (and related media technologies, 
especially the computer mediation of Prairie's relationship with her 
mother) to be such an intimate companion to the lives of his 
characters. This shows how these media distort the lives of human 
beings -- human beings, remarkably adaptable, can adapt to just about 
anything (some people managed to remain human even in the worst 
horrors of the Holocaust, for example; scientists continue to figure 
out ways we can live with pollution and global warming; etc.), and so 
of course they manage to make even media-mediated moments human to 
some degree.  I don't find this the fun and flattering picture of 
human life that some others apparently do (even the smartest media 
wind up co-opted by corporate interests -- the beloved The Simpsons, 
for example, recently served to sell Intel microprocessors, in a 
massive, well-orchestrated, cross-media campaign).  In Vineland, 
Pynchon punctuates these media-mediated relationships with moments, 
free of media, that, by comparison and contrast with the 
media-mediated moments, underscore the way human-to-human 
interactions are degraded by the intrusion of media that serve 
corporate and especially government interests. The most powerful 
moments in Vineland -- Blood and Vato feeding Brock Vond to the 
indigenous ghosts across the river; the older generation passing 
along the values of direct action against corporate interests; and 
more -- stand out precisely because they lie beyond the reach of the 
TV and computer media that mediate and control so much of the rest of 
the novel.

-Doug


At 9:20 AM -0500 7/6/00, JEANNIE BERNIER wrote:
>Regarding 80's vs. 90's (and nought's) TV and it's place in controlling the
>populace:
>
>It's interesting that Vineland is set in a time when suddenly cable is
>taking over, so rather than the 3 network plus 3-4 oddball UHF stations you
>may have had access to in 1979, you suddenly have all these new stations to
>choose from (I want my MTV!) and there's this novelty to sitting and looping
>for hours through the programming, and advertising certainly took advantage.
>This is the point at which the "niche" market started to become a reality -
>rather than your product advertising having to appeal to the widest
>audience, you were free to start targeting demographics based on which
>stations you were airing on.
>
>Now, advertising is losing some of it's power because there's so darn much
>of it that it's become background noise.  The reasons that companies look
>for more and different ways for putting their message in front of eyeballs
>(those billboards on the back of bathroom stalls in bars come to mind) is
>that overall advertising effectiveness is on the decline - you get less
>sales for each dollar spent than 20 years ago.
>
>And, as Josh points out, the net is taking time away from TV viewing -  now
>you've got this whole new novelty medium to pay attention to - just in time
>too, as it's dawing on us that you can keep adding channels ad infinitum (I
>want my DirectTV!) but there's still nothin' on.

-- 

d  o  u  g    m  i  l  l  i  s  o  n  <http://www.online-journalist.com>