The networks and magazines sell your head to the corporations that make the products that you will in turn buy. A magazine in fact promises the advertiser a certain amount of heads. My circulation is 25,000 copies, 3 readers per copy...that's 75,000 heads. In other words, 75,000 people that could buy your product: the bigger the size of the ad, the bigger the cheese on the mousetrap.
The global media market has come to be dominated by seven multinational corporations: Disney, AOL Time Warner, Sony, News Corporation, Viacom, Vivendi, and Bertelsmann. These seven companies own the major U.S. film studios, all but one of the U.S. television networks, the few companies that control 80-85 percent of the global music market, the preponderance of satellite broadcasting worldwide.
Whopping three-quarters of global spending on advertising ends up in the pockets of a mere 20 media companies. Ad spending has grown by leaps and bounds in the past decade, as TV has been opened to commercial exploitation, and is growing at more than twice the rate of gross domestic product growth.
As a reader, have you ever filled out those polls in magazines? They dont do those for popularity contests. They do them to know what you are buying, where you live, how old you are, etc. The magazines then use this information to sell your head. And hopefully you will buy a product advertised in the next issue.
There has been a dramatic shift in sales among the books that were published. The book business has begun shifting even more heavily towards celebrity-driven best-sellers. The number of best-sellers (books that sold 100,000 or more copies) grew substantially in the 1990s. When that fact is juxtaposed against an overall decline in book sales, it is clear that mid-list books are falling off the edge. Good fiction, investigative reporting and other quality books are simply being squeezed out of the market.
Ad spending hit a record $244 billion last year, with companies investing more money and brainpower than ever to make you buy. That figure will drop this year for the first time since 1991, though it is projected to hit a new record in 2002.
Kids influence $200 billion in spending each year; the ad industry employs market researchers and developmental psychologists to hone its pitch.
Recent research shows that the average American 3-year old recognizes 100 brand logos.
A study by the University of Wisconsin found that the space occupied by corporate logos at schools, such as billboards and scoreboards, went up 539 percent in the last decade, while the amount of corporate-sponsored education materials had gone up 20-fold.
Companies are hiring people to surf the Web, enter chat rooms and pose as regular folks while touting products or just defending certain companies from criticism.
