The moment MTV stops selling pairs of shoes or tubes of lipstick is the moment that they stop broadcasting.
Hate to be the big downer in the party here, but this applies to EVERY television station outside of PBS. Once advertisers deem their plugs on CNN, MSNBC or Nick at Nite aren't effective, those networks will stop broadcasting as well. The funny thing is, CNN, MSNBC and Nick are all doing OK with the traditional differentation of advertising/content that MTV is slowly abandoning.
Think about this. Your "MTV was always kinda crappy argument" is like saying "Well, the person I'm dating was 10 pounds overweight when we met, and now is 35 pounds too chubby, and in a couple years is going to be morbidly obese, but hey he/she was kinda fat when we started daing, so who cares."
The thing is, it's not just MTV. If it was, I wouldn't care. This is the trend media is heading. We were just talking on TIG yesterday, I think, about how a company using money from Universal Music has purchased Idolator and Stereogum. You think that's being done out of Universal's admiration for music coverage? It's going to be, without a doubt, a way for major labels to covertly squeeze promo into those influential blogs. I'm not saying those sites are going to be hyping crapola every day, but, come on, Universal via Buzznet expects to get a return on its investment. And I'm not talking karma. Sadly, I'm going to have to take virtually EVERYTHING those sites say with a grain of salt from now on, especially how there's been no up-front disclosure about the links between it and the world's biggest music company, at least as far as I've heard. That's duplicitious, shady, untrustworthy and unethical. Period.
It's just not that. It's that constant stream of piddly product-placement that's made "The Office" nothing more than a commercial disguised as a sitcom. It's Rolling Stone's ability to let Camel cigarettes put a gigantic insert into the magazine that's purposefully crafted to deceive readers into thinking it's editorial content. It's that Transformers movie that was just a transparent ploy to try to get kids to purchase toys and their parents to purchase the cars.
Maybe it's because I was a journalism major in a program that put a large emphasis on media ethics/media effects that I'm so sensitive to this sort of issue. Maybe I'm just being paranoid. I do know, however, that we're slowly inching down a road that's leading us to a point where all mass media will serve no higher purpose than to shift products. And, yes, that's how it is now, but it's at least nice to have some sort of transparent separation between the two.
There isn't going to be a dramatic watershed moment where all media shifts to being purely promotional vehicles of industry. It'll be a years-long series of tiny steps like these, tiny steps we just sat back and complacently contemplated, tiny steps that, through our own lack of backbone to ignore all content-intrusive promotion, have the potential to utterly destroy the media.
Tiny steps when we shrug off little things like MTV's latest marketing/advertising ploy.
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The Grim said on April 17, 2008:
Hate to be the big downer in the party here, but this applies to EVERY television station outside of PBS. Once advertisers deem their plugs on CNN, MSNBC or Nick at Nite aren't effective, those networks will stop broadcasting as well. The funny thing is, CNN, MSNBC and Nick are all doing OK with the traditional differentation of advertising/content that MTV is slowly abandoning.
Think about this. Your "MTV was always kinda crappy argument" is like saying "Well, the person I'm dating was 10 pounds overweight when we met, and now is 35 pounds too chubby, and in a couple years is going to be morbidly obese, but hey he/she was kinda fat when we started daing, so who cares."
The thing is, it's not just MTV. If it was, I wouldn't care. This is the trend media is heading. We were just talking on TIG yesterday, I think, about how a company using money from Universal Music has purchased Idolator and Stereogum. You think that's being done out of Universal's admiration for music coverage? It's going to be, without a doubt, a way for major labels to covertly squeeze promo into those influential blogs. I'm not saying those sites are going to be hyping crapola every day, but, come on, Universal via Buzznet expects to get a return on its investment. And I'm not talking karma. Sadly, I'm going to have to take virtually EVERYTHING those sites say with a grain of salt from now on, especially how there's been no up-front disclosure about the links between it and the world's biggest music company, at least as far as I've heard. That's duplicitious, shady, untrustworthy and unethical. Period.
It's just not that. It's that constant stream of piddly product-placement that's made "The Office" nothing more than a commercial disguised as a sitcom. It's Rolling Stone's ability to let Camel cigarettes put a gigantic insert into the magazine that's purposefully crafted to deceive readers into thinking it's editorial content. It's that Transformers movie that was just a transparent ploy to try to get kids to purchase toys and their parents to purchase the cars.
Maybe it's because I was a journalism major in a program that put a large emphasis on media ethics/media effects that I'm so sensitive to this sort of issue. Maybe I'm just being paranoid. I do know, however, that we're slowly inching down a road that's leading us to a point where all mass media will serve no higher purpose than to shift products. And, yes, that's how it is now, but it's at least nice to have some sort of transparent separation between the two.
There isn't going to be a dramatic watershed moment where all media shifts to being purely promotional vehicles of industry. It'll be a years-long series of tiny steps like these, tiny steps we just sat back and complacently contemplated, tiny steps that, through our own lack of backbone to ignore all content-intrusive promotion, have the potential to utterly destroy the media.
Tiny steps when we shrug off little things like MTV's latest marketing/advertising ploy.