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a consumer/provider necessity — advertising is a well-oiled scourge on humanity....

Have you ever seen a parade of an army? Company by company, they file by. On a war footing, a company is 250 men. When a regiment of I4 companies has passed, you have seen 3,755 men; and that looks like many, many people. 

 

BY E T GUNDLACH — 1931

A Parade of 3,000,000 Men

 

Do you know that many people by name? To supply these people [3,755 men] requires more than 300 dozen hats, more than 600 dozen shoes and some 60,000 buttons; also per day many thousands of pounds of beef, bread and sugar. One regiment passes a given point in about four hours.

Two regiments march by with their auxiliaries and you have seen a brigade of 8,210 men; an important officer, a Brigadier General, is in command.

March on with a division, 27,152 men. It would take nearly three days and three nights marching steadily every minute for a division to pass in parade. It is a huge force, this division. Think of it—twenty-seven thousand men. Yet this is only an army in miniature.

Double or treble the division and you have an army corps. You then have as many men as there are men, women and children in a good sized city-imagine them all gathered together outside of town in one mass! Double, treble or quadruple the army corps and you have an army.

(The figures above are those of the world war. Sizes of army units have changed from time to time. Those now cited are: regiment, 3,105 men; brigade, 6,210; division, 21,480; present peace strength figures being approximately one half of these.)

Continue adding army to army until you have 3,000,000 men, nearly 50% more than the total of the American Expeditionary forces, about equal to the number of men in all the trenches at any one time during the World War.

A parade of all these 3,000,000 would require nearly a year of marching, twenty-four hours a day. A single file would stretch from New York to Denver.

Indeed, the mind cannot picture 3,000,000 units of anything. We can approach the idea only by multiplying and re-multiplying the units that are within our range of concept.

Now then — 3,000,000 is the number of human beings within the United States, who every week buy our largest weekly and pay 5c to read it. Four to fivefold the number of buyers is often accepted as the number of readers of a magazine. Surely we may feel that practically all of those who invested the 5c piece, bought the magazine to read a good part of it.

Now supposing, while this host of 3,000,000 is passing, each company captain receives a wheelbarrow filled with 250 copies of that magazine and every soldier voluntarily pays 5c for his copy:

I have a full page advertisement in that issue. So let us follow a wheelbarrow full to a company' street:

Half of the men do not even open the magazine to my particular page, half of the others read or look at the story on the page opposite, but seem to have shut their eyes mentally to all display advertising. The others, some 60, glance accidentally at my announcement, catch the trade name and quickly turn the page. How exasperating — how disappointing!

I walk into the street of «Company 2." Again 250 men are sitting around, reading the magazine, while only a fourth take a glimpse at my page, not one taking a second look. Yes, the critics are right in saying "nobody reads ads!"

Just to confirm my theory, I step over to the third company street; and there again they are sitting around, 250 of them, reading the weekly, one out of four perhaps giving an accidental, involuntary glance at my big ad, and no more. I count them, 240 of them, 245 of them, all passing by my announcement; and that page cost me $8,000!

But then — in the corner I notice one private who stops at the picture of my merchandise and makes a comment to another soldier.

Then there are three more who bend over and start to talk about my article. But d[AMN] it!

There comes mess call and the conversation ends.

I go to "Company 4" after mess and see the same sort of scene.

I quit disgusted. I now know that my $8,000 is a waste, for I have observed 1,000 men and there was hedly a speck of an interest from any of them in my advertising.

But! Later I hear that a coporal in the fourth company had read my advertisement and had read it through. He and one of those five men in "Company 3" had called for my product in town on the following Saturday. Then two more men in the third, and one man in the fourth company, bought during the week.

Still later I also learn that these same buyers of my magazine had passed their copies around on an average to 3, 4, or 5 others. Well, let's estimate it at 3: One thousand men is I/3000 part of the number who had paid 5c for the magazine, hence, call it around I/9000 part of the total number of readers; cut it down to 1/8000.

If only 250 men in each 1,000 accidentally glanced at the advertisement long enough to catch the brand name, then that means 2,000,000 persons upon whom my advertisement had made some slight impression. Thus at $8,000 per page, about 4/10ths cent per person.

Was it worth while?

Estimate it or guess it; but here is a a figure 4/10ths of one cent; and that figure is not an adjective.

On a most conspicuous advertisement, we have good reason to estimate the cost per reader of the logotype at not much more than 1/10th of a cent, and possibly even less!

Among the 1,000, there were five in whom my advertisement had incited a conversation, and there were two who had bought; and who later caused sales to three friends.

Multiply these figures by 8,000. Now estimate what a new customer means in repeat business (that can be estimated, not merely guessed at, by a careful checking of territorial sales at intelligently set intervals). Estimate what each customer means in orders from friends by opening new channels not securable except by advertising (that, too, can be and is estimated and with degrees approximating accuracy by mass tests as explained in later chapters). Certainly the action, such as the purchase of goods by that corporal, and the approximate number of such corporals has been determined many times by advertisers who trace results.

The parade of any army has been presented not as a pretty of that which must happen if you advertise. What will happen depends upon you and your product, and also (though to a much lesser degree) upon where and how you present your advertising message. While no romance about publicity should ever remove the spirit of caution, the action figures as quoted are not without a basis, in fact, on a rough average, they are a quasi-estimate. And as to the gradual spread of results, the story shows what we know is indeed happening in many instances.

We cannot expect the publicity yardstick to be always a tailor’s tape, so when unable to measure the inches, we shall not insist that "therefore" there is no yardage.

 

FACTS AND FETISHES IN ADVERTISING

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

squares...

FROM THE NEW YORKER C.1960s....

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

advertising politics....

The Bizarre State of Western Democracy

BY Prabhat Patnaik

 

DURING the entire post-war period when it has been in existence in the metropolitan countries, democracy has never been in as bizarre a state as it is today. Democracy is supposed to mean the pursuit of policies that are in conformity with the wishes of the electorate. True, it is not that the governments first ascertain popular wishes, and then decide on policy; the conformity between the two is typically ensured under bourgeois rule by the government deciding on policies in accordance with ruling class interests, and then having a propaganda machinery that persuades the people about the wisdom of these policies The conformity between public opinion and what the ruling class wants is thus achieved in a complex manner whose essence lies in the manipulation of public opinion.

What is currently happening however is altogether different: public opinion, notwithstanding all the propaganda directed at it, wants policies that are altogether different from those being systematically pursued by the ruling class. The policies favoured by the ruling class in other words are being pursued despite public opinion being palpably and systematically opposed to them. This is made possible by having most political parties line up behind these policies; that is, by getting a very large spectrum of political formations or parties backing these policies against the wishes of the majority of the electorate. The current situation is thus characterised by two distinct features: first, a broad unanimity among the bulk of political formations (parties); and second, a total lack of congruence between what these parties agree on and what the people want. Such a situation is quite unprecedented in the history of bourgeois democracy.These policies moreover relate not to minor questions concerning this or that matter, but to fundamental issues of war and peace.

Take the United States. The majority of people in that country according to all available opinion polls are appalled by Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people; they would like the US to bring the war to an end and not keep supplying arms to Israel for prolonging it. But the US government is doing precisely the opposite, even at the risk of escalating the war into one that engulfs the entire middle east. Likewise, public opinion in the US does not want a continuation of the Ukraine war. It favours an end to that conflict through a negotiated peace; but the US government (together with that of the UK) has systematically torpedoed all possibilities of peaceful settlement. Its opposition to the Minsk agreements, an opposition conveyed to Ukraine through British Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s trip to Kiev, is what started the war in the first place; and even now when Putin had made certain proposals for establishing peace, it egged Ukraine on to launch its Kursk offensive which ended all hopes of peace.

What is significant is that both the Republicans and the Democrats in the US are agreed on this policy of providing arms to Netanyahu and Zelensky, despite public opinion wanting peace and despite the fact that any adventurism by Ukraine runs the risk of unleashing a nuclear conflagration.

This contrast between what the people want, despite all the propaganda they have been subjected to, and what the pollical establishment ordains, afflicts all metropolitan countries; but nowhere is it as stark as in Germany. The Ukraine war directly impinges on Germany in a manner it does not on any other metropolitan country, since Germany was entirely dependent on Russian gas for its energy needs. The sanctions on Russia have caused a shortage of gas; and the import of more expensive substitutes from the US has pushed up gas prices to levels that strongly impinge on the living standards of German workers. An end to the Ukraine war is urgently demanded by German workers; but neither the ruling coalition consisting of the Social Democrats, the Free Democrats and the Greens, nor the main opposition consisting of the Christian Democrats and the Christian Socialists, is showing any interest in a peaceful resolution of the conflict. On the contrary the German political establishment is trying to whip up fears of Russian troops appearing on German borders, even though, ironically, it is German troops that are stationed at present in Lithuania on the borders of Russia!

In their desperation for an end to the Ukraine war the German working people are turning to the neo-fascist AfD which professes to be against the war (though one knows it will inevitably betray this promise once it comes anywhere near power) and the new Left party of Sahra Wagenknecht that broke away from the parent Left Party, Die Linke, on this very issue of war.

Exactly the same is true of German attitudes towards the genocide in Gaza. While the bulk of the German population opposes this genocide, the German government has actually criminalised all opposition to the Israeli genocide on the grounds that it constitutes “anti-semitism”. It even broke up a convention that was being organised to protest against the genocide, to which internationally-known speakers like Yanis Varoufakis had been invited. The use of the “anti-semitism” stick to beat all opposition to Israel’s aggression is pervasive in other metropolitan countries too. In Britain, Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the Labour Party, was hounded out of that party, ostensibly on grounds of his so-called “anti-semitism” but actually because of his support for the Palestinian cause; and US campus authorities have invoked this charge against the widespread campus protests that have rocked that country.

Such riding roughshod over public opinion is typically sought to be achieved by keeping these burning issues of peace and war off political discussion altogether. In the coming US presidential elections, for instance, since both the contenders, Donald Trump and Kamla Harris, are agreed on supplying arms to Israel, this issue itself will not figure in any presidential debate or in the presidential campaign. While other topics where they differ will hold centre-stage, the crucial one that affects people and where they hold a different opinion from the contestants, will not be an issue for debate.

One reason for the support of the political establishment for Israeli actions, which is far from being a negligible one, is the generous funding that such support gets from pro-Israel donors. According to a report published in the Delphi Initiative(August 21), half the cabinet of Keir Starmer, the newly-elected Labour prime minister of Britain, had received money from pro-Israel sources to fight the elections that brought them to power. The same number of the same journal also reports that one-third of the Conservative members of the British parliament had received money from pro-Israel sources for elections. Pro-Israel money in other words is available to both the main parties of Britain; this makes support for Israeli actions a bipartisan affair.

On the other hand what happens to those who stand with Palestine is illustrated by two cases in the US Members of the Congress, Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, both black progressive representatives, who were sympathetic to the Palestinian cause and strong critics of Israeli genocide, were  defeated by the intervention of AIPAC (American-Israel Public Affairs Committee), a powerful pro-Israel lobby, which poured millions of dollars into the effort. The Delphi Initiative of August 31 reports that 17 million dollars had been spent for Bowman’s defeat and 9 million dollars for the Ad campaign against Cori Bush. Interestingly, the campaign against Cori Bush did not mention Israel’s aggression against Gaza, as AIPAC knew that on that particular issue the public would have supported Cori Bush rather than her opponent, and hence frustrated its plans for her defeat. What all this means is that a fundamental decision on war and peace that affects everybody is being taken in the metropolitan countries against the wishes of the people by a political establishment that is financed by lobbies with vested interests.

In the metropolis there has thus been a transition from “manipulation of dissent” through propaganda, to the total ignoring of dissent, even dissent by a majority, that has proved to be immune to propaganda. This represents a new stage in the attenuation of democracy, a stage characterised by an unprecedented moral bankruptcy of the political establishment. Such moral bankruptcy of the traditional political establishment also constitutes the context for the growth of fascism; but whether or not fascism actually comes to power, the attenuation of democracy in metropolitan societies has already disempowered people to an extent that is quite unprecedented.

https://peoplesdemocracy.in/2024/0908_pd/bizarre-state-western-democracy

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

biden 2.01....

US Vice President Kamala Harris has finally revealed her policy proposals, only for eagle-eyed viewers to discover that her website’s ‘issues’ section appears to have been lifted wholesale from President Joe Biden’s site.

Harris announced her candidacy in July, after Biden – who appeared visibly senile during a debate with Donald Trump the previous month – suspended his campaign. While Harris’ entry to the presidential race was met with enthusiasm from Democrats, the vice president has come under increasing pressure for refusing to sit for unscripted interviews and declining to publish any policy proposals on her campaign website.

The Harris campaign appeared to rectify the latter concern on Sunday, adding an ‘issues’ section to the site. However, X user Corinne Green discovered that the section’s metadata – information not normally visible to someone browsing the site – indicated it was copied from Biden’s now-defunct campaign site. 

Inside the section’s code, a line reading “Are you with us? Join our campaign to re-elect Joe Biden today!” could be seen. This line was visible when links to the issues section were shared or viewed in Google’s search results, The New Republic, a leftist news site, noted.

The error has since been corrected, and links to the issues section now read “Vice President Harris and Governor Walz are fighting for a New Way Forward.”

“This is dangerous territory for Harris,” The New Republic wrote, pointing out that according to a recent New York Times poll, more than 60% of voters want a “major change”from Biden’s policies, and only a quarter feel that Harris can deliver that change.

Inside the issues section, some of Harris’ own economic proposals are listed, including $25,000 grants for first-time home buyers and a ban on corporate “price gouging.” Most of the policies, however, are mirror images of those proposed by Biden, with Harris’ name and biographical details swapped in place of the president’s.

Harris and Trump will face each other in an ABC News debate on Tuesday night. Most recent polls show the two candidates within a single point of each other, and in a statistical dead heat in the battleground states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

https://www.rt.com/news/603779-harris-campaign-site-issues/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.