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Fun quote of the day…

Getting a tattoo is like buying a “totally awesome” sweater and wearing it for the rest of your life.

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Clever Racism

There’s a lot of controversy in my area regarding a comic that someone drew contrasting three cities in my state. You can read it here:

For those readers who are not familiar with the cities mentioned, the funny thing about the comic is that it’s true. Midland is well-to-do and hoity-toity. Bay City does have tons of bars. It’s hard to believe, but when you drive through neighborhoods, every corner has a little bar on it. And of course Saginaw has a very high crime rate.

Now people don’t like having their faults shoved in their faces. So I understand why people from Saginaw are upset about the comic. However, the complaints have taken a new turn. The comic is now considered racist.

I know what you just did. You just went back and looked at the comic to see if there were any black people in it. There’s not any. All of the people depicted in the comic appear to be white.

I know what you’re thinking, how could it be racist when there are no black people in it. Heck, it does not even reference any black people. it does not even hint to any black people.

But that’s not good enough for some people. Some people are so adept at seeing racism they can find it where it doesn’t objectively exist. These people find such racism not through the objective expressed throught, but through mind reading. Here’s one of many comments about this comic:

While the message was not totally untrue, the cartoon was indeed racist.
The person who created it thought they were clever by not making the Saginaw character black, but instead making him a “white” man with a black mask totally covering his face and black gloves covering his hands.

I guarantee you he thinks he is the most clever person in the world right now because he created an out for himself.

If you accuse him of being racist, I guarantee you he will argue that it is not a black man, but a white man with a mask on.

Son, you are not that clever.

I think it is funny that the Bay City residents don’t realize that they were being insulted also. He was calling you a bunch of shaved head, unkempt, t shirt wearing rubes that drink beer all day.

You would think someone with an Arab sounding name like his (not the most favored people in this country right now) would be a little smarter.

Let’s go through that comment.

First, the poster admits the facts in the comic are true. In other words, the objective ideas plainly expressed in the comic are not racist. He admits that. But he doesn’t stop there.

The poster reads the “thoughts” of the two comic strip writers and derived the additional “truth” that the real intent of the black mask was to hide the “truth” that the Saginaw resident was actually black. (Of course the poster assumes a priori the black mask is actually black, it could be dark brown, dark blue, or dark purple, as far as he knows.)

That “intent” cannot be objectively found anywhere in the comic. You have to read the mind of the writer and artist to find out their hidden intent. And this mind reading can occur without even meeting the writer and artist. Not only can the mind reading occur across vast distances, it can occur over vast amount of time. These mind readers can infer the hidden racist intent of authors who have been dead for centuries.

(And of course it’s hilarious that the mind reader ends his comment by slamming people of middle eastern descent as “not the most favored people in this country right now.” I don’t need to be a mind reader to know that was a slam.)

The problem with this subjective mind-reading method for finding racism is that it belittles real racism. There was a time when there were laws on the books that held that black people were second class citizens. Any black person who stepped out of line would have been lynched. Well, lynched after a horrific beating.

Right now, as I speak, there are racist pricks out there who are making plans to kill our President. I hope they don’t succeed. I hope they don’t even carry out an attempt. But they are there.

But despite the dangers and harm of objective racism, everyone is wasting time focusing on subjective racism. Compared to being beating to a pulp and then hung from a tree to die, or having our President killed, exactly why would anyone care about an admittedly factually accurate comic?

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Is advertising revenue being killed by over-advertising?

Everyone knows that newspapers are in trouble. They’re trying to solve the problem by getting readers to pay for news, as if it’s always been done that way. As if it’s the evil internet’s fault for their decline. Nope. Newspapers have traditionally survived on advertising. They’ve used the nominal costs people pay for newspapers to more accurately gauge actual readership. So the problem facing news is not getting people to pay, but the lack of advertising revenue.

A similar thing is happening with broadcast TV. (A great read for anyone who’s interested in broadcast TV. Here’s another one on the same topic.) Historically, people watched TV for free over the air and the costs were paid by advertisers. However, right now it’s more lucrative to milk money from cable and satellite companies. Some are saying that Fox and NBC will soon dump their their costly broadcast affiliates and follow the “superior… cable model.”

So why is advertising revenue nearly dead? Well, it’s quite obvious that the economy is in the dumps. With fewer businesses with fewer dollars to spare, there’s less to spend on advertising.

But I think it’s more than that. I think we’re now so saturated with advertising that it no longer provides much benefit to the advertiser. I didn’t notice it until last night when I was watching a college bowl game. I’m not making this up, one of the cameras had an advertiser. Yes. You heard that right. The overhead camera was “brought to you by DirecTV.”

In our current world advertising is ubiquitous. Sure it’s always been on billboards, TV, and radio but now it’s much worse.

We’ve got ads in the products we buy, for example the milk I buy has cereal ads on it. Products now have product placements! Am I the only person who thinks that’s fricken insane?!

Speaking of product placements, we have ads in our movies and TV shows. (Heck, my local radio station’s morning show is actually an infomercial.) Not to mention that they advertise other shows during the shows.

We’ve got ads in our games, and not just video games.

We watch ads at the movie theaters prior to watching the trailers, which are themselves merely ads (which likely have product placements).

We have ads dropped on our laps when we attempt to read magazines.

We’re confronted with ads while walking down the aisle while we’re shopping.

I once used a gas pump, which had a speaker built into the nozzle, which blasted out ads.

There simply has to be a point of diminishing returns relating to advertising. A point where there is so much advertising, we stop noticing it and it stops being effective.

Think about this. What company is making a ton of money via advertising? It’s sole income is made via advertising. Despite the slump in advertising, it’s bottom line is fantastic. Give up? it’s Google.

So why is Google making money with advertising where everyone else is failing? Have you seen Google’s website? it’s not filled to the brim with ads. In fact, it’s initial site has no ads on it.

You don’t get ads with Google until you search for something. Then, they’re out of the way, are not distracting, and are actually (kind of sort of) related to your search. So they’re sometimes actually sort of helpful… you want to click them.

So instead of blinding you with ads you will attempt to avoid, Google tries to help you buy showing you a limited number of ads which may (but not always) help you.

I’m guessing the period of over-advertising we’re experiencing was brought about by MBAers. They crunched the numbers and decided, “You know, if we sold an ad on our camera, we’d get X amount of dollars above what we’re making right now. it’s pure profit.”

But that extra ad is not pure profit. Consumers can only spend a set amount of money. So that extra ad ends up watering down all the other ads, making them less valuable. Which makes advertisers less likely to pay. Which makes the entire business model of relying on advertising come collapsing down.

Update – Jan. 7, 2010: I just found this great quote from someone at Google explaining why ad blockers in Google’s Chrome browser won’t be a bad thing:

“It’s unlikely ad blockers are going to get to the level where they imperil the advertising market, because if advertising is so annoying that a large segment of the population wants to block it, then advertising should get less annoying. So I think the market will sort this out.”

Google certainly gets what I’ve been talking about. Advertising should not be about throwing as many ads as you can out there. There’s a balance. If you put too many they’ll become ineffective.

Update – Jan. 22, 2010: Wow, this is simply bizarre. Kraft Foods is the official sponsor of the demolition of the Dallas Cowboys’ old stadium!

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