A long time ago, in a millennium so far away I can’t even smell it anymore, a friend of TSM suggested he read an important work by author Naomi Wolfe titled “The Beauty Myth.” It was an impressive read, and I even had the occasion once to meet the author somewhat accidentally, as she decided that my overly friendly dog was worth playing with as she was trying to just innocently sit on a park bench. The Beauty Myth became something of a mantra after its release, describing how women are conditioned by our culture to pursue standards of beauty and attractiveness that are artificial, damaging, and fundamentally adverse to the reality of women’s inherent understanding of their beauty and actual value.
I bring this up because some readers may know that in later years, Ms. Wolfe became one of the most “out there” conspiracists, wildly expressing ideas that would make Lyndon LaRouche blush. Whatever respect she earned with her early work was set ablaze with about a gallon of lighter fluid on Twitter. Yet this doesn’t diminish the strength of her argument that it’s in the conditioning and acceptance of norms provided by groups with an agenda that biases become fixed and nearly impossible to challenge.
Such is the state of affairs regarding quality/safety in the media and digital advertising world, where the objectives of intermediaries to control the narrative around what is and is not “brand safe” or “brand suitable” runs head-first into the contradictions it creates. To wit: while everyone is wailing about the “duopoly” of Meta and Google hovering up 2/3rds of digital advertising spend, nobody seems at all plussed about the actual duopoly of brand safety companies that, on a good day are more like a sleepy night security guard in a dry goods warehouse than the white hat Sheriffs’ posse they make themselves out to be.
Don’t get me wrong, the content side doesn’t have a lot to brag about themselves, with the ratings of feature films left up to the MPAA, a secret society that nobody has any fucking idea who is a member of, and how they even come up with what constitutes enough sex, violence, or foul language to warrant an “R” rating. And TV has its own bunch of nattering nabobs of negativism in the form of the Standards & Practices departments of every major network. “You want this to air? You’re gonna have to give mamma some sugar and take out those naughty bits. We have the FCC watching!”. Believe me when I say this: the FCC is only activated when that same 6th-grade science teacher sends their 15th handwritten letter to the Chairman demanding to know why the word “damn” is allowed during prime time when “darn” would go just fine.
So, we have self-appointed content regulatory regimes that assert parochial mores as the definitive guide to what shows and movies are appropriate or acceptable. We have for-profit companies now delineating which digital content published online is soft and gushy enough for proximity with advertisers’ precious, precious brands.
Enough already.
Brands aren’t sponges that absorb whatever odors they are adjacent to. That’s just fear-mongering in the worst way possible, with a sales method bordering on extortion. “That’s a nice brand you got there; it would be a shame if something happened to it,” goes the pitch, and out comes the envelope full of cash to the local enforcer.
And let’s not even start with what passes for “high-quality content” in cable television these days. The fact that nobody has pitched and landed a reality show on a Discovery Networks channel that involves 1) sharks, 2) a dating competition, and 3) tornadoes remains a wonder to me. Demanding that this kind of programming (and I’m looking at all of the cable networks when I say this) live under a “premium content” label is nothing less than the act of a backstage parent insisting that their toddler deserves to win a ribbon in a fixed beauty pageant. The streamers have taken the mantle from the old HBO/Showtime and invested in scripted entertainment, which the cable nets and 3-letter nets lost the courage to make a long time ago.
All you have to do is look at the original lineup on Apple TV+ to see the difference. Between “Severance,” “Pretty Little Liars,” and “The Morning Show,” you’ve got enough Emmys to sink a small skiff. Netflix pulls up a close second with some of their originals, although the whole “we released this movie to a single theater in Des Moines” maneuver to become Oscar Eligible is working the refs in a whole new (but kind of funny) way. For their part, Prime is still finding its footing but occasionally pulls off a winner. Prime Video is like the college Sophomore who has changed their major five times but eventually comes back to General Studies, which is fine. It’s just been hard to track the swings. And what in the world is the deal with Freevee anyway?
Apple TV+ has set the bar for quality, and I’m trying to imagine a world where Steve Jobs is actually reviewing dailies, acting like an old-school 1940s studio boss, and calling people up in the middle of the night just to tell them why they are so stupid. He would run circles around the folks at the head of the major studios today. Remember, even Disney needed Pixar.
So all of this posturing to position a large swath of ad-supported streaming video content as “premium” is just your typical industry conceit to command higher CPM ad pricing on a rate card, which will have the living heck (I wanted to use another word but Standards & Practices got to me) discounted out of it once negotiations really begin. Meanwhile, actual news gatherers, you know, with reporters who research and confirm facts before publishing them, are going bankrupt because these guardians of brand virtue and virginity are preventing a simple banner ad or 15-second spot from running adjacent to anything that can be considered unpleasant.
You know what? There’s a lot of unpleasantness out there. It’s real. It’s life.
Shit happens, and I, for one, am glad someone is taking notes and reporting on it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have the benefit of knowing about it. The result is that instead of a legitimate publisher or streaming channel getting that ad revenue, an unscrupulous and malignant actor who has learned how to game the system with fraud is collecting all those ads to run against bogus content that no human is actually watching. Congratulations, you’ve safeguarded yourself into a mafia state.
By the end of this article, you may conclude that TSM has also “gone round the bend,” like the aforementioned Ms. Wolfe. But take a moment to consider that by not pushing boundaries in content or advertising and by accepting these boundaries and guardrails as sacrosanct, we’re all just kind of treading water in our own bathtubs. You couldn’t get The Wire, or The Sopranos made today on HBO or any ad-supported network. Too gritty, too triggering. And for the brands sleeping well at night believing that their investments in brand safety and suitability services are some kind of magic Faraday cage that insures them against an inadvertent PR disaster, think again. They are unknowingly and unwittingly arming the next generation of digital terrorists.
So the next time you’re thinking about a media mix for a client or trying to decide on a publisher list for a campaign, take the fucking blinders (e.g., algorithmic filters) off for a moment and actually look at who is making the content, not the arbitrary and capricious evaluation of that content by a shadowy corporate cabal intent upon demonstrating their value where little exists.
Yup, definitely round the bend.
This Week’s Music: Jurassic Five – A Day At The Races [Explicit]
The views and opinions expressed by The Streaming Madman are entirely his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Streaming Wars or its affiliates.
