(a work in progress)

Delineating the sinuous contours of the Hispanic-American consumptive experience, the diagrammatic phalloid above, included in a report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau, offers a multi-tendriled multi-media marketing strategy for a multi-cultural world. It would seem the multi- has displaced the mass- in an industry increasingly oriented towards segmentation and personalization. The IAB erects the Hispanic Committee in 2004 to account for the population’s growing purchasing power, a power that, as has been recognized by the advertising industry since its inception, is accessed through the eyeballs. Jeff Hicks, president of ad agency Crispin Porter & Bogusky, declares, rather ominously: “Advertisers are going to follow eyeballs, and they’ll find a way to get them.”[1] Eyeblaster, a company whose function it is to manage and calculate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, is aptly named in its invocation of both a violation of the eye (castration[2]) and an overwhelming release (gratification). The illusory moment of release for the castrated individual can perhaps be located in brand loyalty, in the intimacy formed between consumer and product packaging, in that warm sensation generated by the sound of a familiar jingle or the sight of a familiar logo, where desire finds in the promise of its fulfillment the means to its repression.

In 2002’s breakthrough “McDonald’s Grilled Chicken Flatbread Sandwich Case Study,” the IAB concludes that “while television and radio advertising barely affected perception of the image statement ‘combination of great flavors’… online advertising greatly increased image perception.”[3] Internet technologies extend the limits of “image statement” circulation and reception, intensifying market specialization while increasing simultaneously the volume and automacity of consumer feedback. The advertising industry has joined new media art zealots in trumpeting the arrival of the interactive age: “Eyeblaster campaigns turn advertising from a one-way street to an immersive dialog” offering “unprecedented levels of engagement…”[4] The aura of interactivity surrounding online marketing provides a new “enthronement of the commodity, with its glitter of distractions...”[5]


[1] As quoted by Jeffrey Goldfarb, “Forecasting the Future,” American Advertiser
[2] Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey (New York: Avon Books, 1998) 433-434.
[3] http://www.iab.net/media/file/xmos_pdf_xmosdatamcd.pdf
[4] http://www.eyeblaster.com/advantages/advertisers.asp
[5] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) 18.