Sales are not a bad thing

The wonders of selling to me

Through the ads on prime time TV

Lose their appeal

And all of their zeal

When you see I get hulu for free

While the Beninger reading brought up a lot of fascinating ideas in terms of social control and technology, one thing I’d like to focus on is the concept of marketing, which has changed drastically as communications technology has advanced. The connection between marketing tools and popular entertainment has become so inextricable as to be unexamined by the consumer. If you watch free television or listen to free radio, the cost to you as a consumer is sitting through the advertisements of the show sponsors, who assess demographic data of the program and try to determine what sales method would deliver their product most effectively to you. As Beninger says, on page 20, “Although advertisers were initially wary of broadcasting because audiences could not be easily identified, by 1930 sponsors were spending $60 million annually on radio in the United States alone”. That problem of audience identification and isolating effectiveness is one that he goes on to elaborate later in the text—exploring mediums from questionnaires to house-to-house interviews and the famed Nielsen ratings system.

While most advertising is appealing in a general sense, it is only with the advent of the Internet that we really get targeted ad content. Google has made a fortune on the business model that by analyzing the things that you, as the individual, are interested in (and then selling that information to marketers), they can sell to you and only you. By having a wide variety of ads available to target people who use certain language in their searches, marketers can appeal specifically to people with a much higher rate of success. It is a ruthlessly efficient advertising system, and what’s more, consumers are in some ways grateful for it, because they are receiving product awareness of things much more likely to appeal to them and likely receiving far less marketing inundation that does not.

If you step away from the clichéd view that all marketing is bad and designed to sell you things you don’t want or need—that marketing creates a sense of false need in the consumer who can get along perfectly fine without a product—you begin to see the true genius and benefit of these targeted marketing models—both to buyers and to sellers. While this data accumulation is without doubt an almost insidious form of social control, it is also a way of respecting and acknowledging everyone’s different interests and needs and permitting more demographic subgroups to flourish. No longer are all women ages 18-25 viewed equally and sold to equally. I prefer to look at it as a positive thing, despite the sinister overtones. I live in a capitalist society. I use products. I like to know about new products that may appeal to me. I know that what appeals to me will likely not appeal to most people. Therefore, I appreciate being marketed to directly and unobtrusively, using the Google and Facebook models. It will be very interesting to see what happens to the relationship between media technology and advertising over the next fifty years, particularly as pay models (iTunes, etc.) start to assert their presence. Make no mistake, they’re still collecting demographic data about you and selling it, you’re just not seeing the results as directly.