Apple's 1984 "Big Brother" ad
An article over at Ad Age brings up an angle on the whole auto industry bailout probably not considered much before. The fact that a yet-to-be-appointed “car czar” will have control over a multibillion dollar advertising budget for the big three. Under the guise of “oversight,” this would effectively “Create World’s Most Powerful Marketing Exec[utive].”
The draft rescue plan for Detroit sent to the White House by Congress yesterday calls for the appointment of a “car czar” who will oversee the Big Three automakers’ expenses over $25 million — which, by extension, would include media buys. Based on Advertising Age’s estimates of spending by General Motors Corp., Chrysler and Ford Motor Co., that would give the as-yet-unnamed car czar control over some $7.3 billion in marketing spending in the U.S. alone.
The most disturbing thoughts about this (particularly to those concerned with liberty) are provoked here:
The car czar would wield a budget more than double those of AT&T, Verizon, Unilever and Johnson & Johnson, which round out the nation’s top five marketing spenders, and give the car czar more clout with media and agencies than such famed names in marketing as Walmart Chief Marketing Officer Stephen Quinn and Anheuser-Busch VP-Marketing Dave Peacock.
…If the bailout goes through, agencies that work for the Big Three will essentially be toiling on a government account, with all the associated red tape and strictures that involves.
So there you have it. We should all be concerned about this for many reasons. As mentioned, the large ad budget that comes with a czar-controlled U.S. auto industry will allow a government bureaucrat to wield unbalanced and unchecked influence over not only who gets ad contracts, but what media outlets get ad money. The czar can simply refuse to give business to an advertising agency who works for a foreign competitor of the big three (or a “non-compliant” corporation), or refuse to pay money to show ads on outlets that they deem “unfriendly” to the administration or its mission. This will be an unequivocal disaster. We have already seen the lengths to which administrations (and pre-administrations) have gone to influence and/or silence media they do not like. What kind of power plays do you think are possible when the administration’s appointee controls a major source of media outlets’ ad revenue? Whatever it ends up being, it won’t be pretty.
The Yahoo-Google ad deal looks like it’s dead. The deal announced in June, would have allowed Google ads to appear on Yahoo search results. Yahoo estimated an $800 million profit during the frist year of the Google ad partnership and would have allowed Yahoo to continue its transion from search to content provider, making it a much more competitive company.
What has likely killed the deal? As stated in a Reuters article:
The two Internet companies have so far failed to reach an agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice on implementing their search advertising partnership.
Why doesn’t the DoJ approve the non-exclusive agreement? Becuase of concerns over competition, that this will reduce competition in the internet marketplace. Anyone following Yahoo, however, knows that Yahoo is becoming less and less competitive as a search provider, but it’s attempts to become more competitive and focus on providing content, something it is much better at than google, are being stymied by government regulation.
The presidential campaign of a certain U.S. senator has just expanded the bounds of the political advertising universe with in-game ads inside popular EA gaming titles.
Racing towards hope? The ads can be seen in nine popular titles, including “Madden NFL 09,” “Need For Speed: Carbon,” “Burnout Paradise.” I’m assuming this is the first time the campaign has intentionally associated itself with that last phrase.
For U.S. senator Barack Obama, that means being the first presidential candidate to buy ad space inside a video game.
According to the Associated Press, Obama’s mug can now be seen in nine different EA games connected to the internet, including Madden NFL 09 and Burnout Paradise, in an effort to appeal to the hard-to-reach 18 to 34 year-old male demographic.
“What we’re trying to do is offer ads in games where we’re simulating a real-world environment, so our racing games, our sports games lend themselves to that,” EA spokeswoman Holly Rockwood told the AP on Tuesday. “That’s very appealing to our advertisers.”
We don’t know how much money EA is making off of this deal, but it certainly seems likely to expand in the future.
As an indicator of how perverse wealth-draining antitrust policy has become, have a look at the “concessions” being squeezed out of Google and Yahoo on their proposed advertising collaboration.
In the communications realm, it used to be that the heavy-metal infrastructure companies were regarded as monopolistic or potentially so. Then, wise regulators feared the Windows desktop surely was an essential facility to which competitors deserved access. Now, “mere” content companies are the monopolies.
Think about it; websites–code!!–are being regarded as something regulators must oversee, as if our left-mouse-button no longer works should the ads we’re served up by Yahoogle seem stilted.
The end result of concessions here, as in satellite mergers and elsewhere, is that we end up with entities that increasingly do not resemble what would exist in a free market. Kind of like banks in a world in which central bankers have controlled money and credit for decades, but that’s another story.
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