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October 06, 2003
Suicide Marketing
Have we passed the point at which mass media is capable of supporting literacy? Let me define the PSP, the porno saturation point. This is the point at which one must resort to the perverse in order to achieve significant market share.
Imagine if you will, the good old days of Rinso. Most of you can't of course, even I'm not that old. But I do have some old radio recordings of the Amos and Andy show which was sponsored by the Rinso dish soap company. Boring commercials. Effective though. All they had to do was say "Rinso is Good" or some such simpleton-proof jingle. To support an enterprise such as the Amos & Andy Show with a listening audience of say 1 million (who knows?), such a simple marketing strategy was effective. And dare I say back in those days, there were businessmen who were clever enough to stay in business on a budget and audience as small as we might imagine.
As Whoopi Goldberg once said, American television is the only place where you can have 5 million friends and be considered a total failure. Today, you need to appeal to zillions to stay in business. It may be difficult to imagine but we live in a nation where it is possible to have 100 million in revenue and fail miserably in business. Many of our businessmen try to solve that problem not by reducing costs or improving their product, but mastering the art of hype. If I can think of nothing else that so brilliantly illustrates this, it is the incredible stupid profitability of the Swiffer. That damned thing can't clean up dirt. But P&G sells millions of 'em. There are many millions of Americans who are just waiting to waste their money on something foolish - the trick is tricking them.
This is where the PSP comes in. If you have to be more exotic than Whoopi Goldberg, you have some tough choices in marketing. But some folks have a head for such things. Who else but a marketing genius could think of the idea that lead to this:
The webcast of a concert by Florida band Hell On Earth that was supposed to occur this past Saturday night (October 4), and feature a live suicide, did not happen, according to the Associated Press. The show and suicide were both scheduled to be broadcast on the band's website from two separate, secret locations, but the site was brought down Saturday night by a flood of data from computers in Hong Kong.
The global market provides great possibilities for kicking all reservations of breaking the PSP barrier. This is what your children have to look forward to.
If I might be sanguine about it for a moment, the probability still exists that we will get the Doctors Without Borders Channel, or the Insurgency Channel. Reality TV could get really real and that could be a gift to democracy. For the moment, however we've got porno. It will get worse before it gets better.
Posted by mbowen at October 6, 2003 11:55 AM
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