04.21.11
More re YouTube and corporate lickspittling
If you upload home videos to YouTube you notice the practice of corporate lickspittling attached to your page as monetization. This happens through the ‘promoted’ vids put at the top of your suggested viewing column.
Almost exclusively they’re devoted to corporate efforts, for want of a better description, GE “good time-y” excrement.
For example, lately I’ve noticed a piece from Wells Fargo Bank.
It’s hit count was unbelievable. Really, people click on some thing identified as being from a big corporate bankster?!
So, out of curiosity, I clicked on it to see that not only does the company pimp up the count but that it’s a large group of paid street performers the bank has hired to look like a “flash mob” in New York.
It’s eight minutes long, almost impossible to view for even two, unless you like watching generally no-talent highly contrived collections of people paid to look happy and staged in Manhattan for purposes of advertising.
Closer to home is previously mentioned General Electric’s obvious campaign to get employees (or any miscellaneous crowd of able bootlickers) to spam YouTube with videos of themselves happily line dancing in homage to the “Good Time” commercial.
(In related matters, GE’s Jeff Immelt is also spammed into YouTube by way of various deadening lectures where he’s given the baton of a master of the universe invited to speak before the country’s business schools. These appear to notorious flat tires. And also now magnets for random comments conspicuously hating on General Electric.)
Anyway, here’s country music superstar Alan Jackson — the man who does the “Good Time” tune — shilling for the man, stoking the employee base to upload its line-dancing videos pronto.
Good news, lads! Good news! Water for the poor if you’ll do a line dance!
Now you can still sort of think of it as just a bit of innocent fun. Except this is America in 2011. No big company does this shit just as innocent fun.
It’s squamous, transparently timed as it was in coincidence with the firm’s exceptionally bad image.
As a star of country music, allegedly an of-the-people heartland thing, Alan Jackson surely ought to have been less reptilian.
GE would give away bottled water to the world’s impoverished if American workers do this, Jackson said. Well, they could just have given away bottled water anyway without using it as a small carrot aimed at getting people to spam the happy GE country line dance for purposes of corporate p.r.
You can also make the argument, that corporate-wise, paying for all this, including the little bit of charity bottled water (which can be written off), was still a lot cheaper than paying a reasonable and legitimate corporate tax to Uncle Sam.
If you click on the “watch on YouTube” link you’ll notice the blandishment wasn’t nearly as popular as Alan Jackson’s name would seem to merit. Others seemed to perceive the mildly nauseating smear of corporate lickspittling coating the enterprise.
From Progressives United yesterday:
On Monday, Progressives United and MoveOn.org delivered our petition for GE C.E.O. Jeffrey Immelt to resign from President Obama’s jobs panel — along with your signature and over 200,000 others — to GE corporate headquarters in Fairfield, Connecticut.
Because you joined us, we were able to change the debate in Washington. Instead of constantly conceding to corporate interests in order to be seen as “business friendly,” the discussion turned to what really needs to be done to fix our economy, create jobs, and improve our nation’s finances. As you know, the answer is not to give the largest multinational corporations everything they want.