Corporate crap hits the cyberfan

Never before has the world seen such a gluttony of commericialism infesting itself in the general citizenry. Or has it? How often have I heard the hippie, now doing time at a local Wherehouse, sigh and wonder what happened to the good ole' days of the Sixties ... memories of Woodstock and Haight-Ashbury bubble to the synaptic surface of a much- abused consciousness so carefully marauded thirty-odd years ago by experimental drugs and too much hootch.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. But there is something wrong with those fog-laden memories. Forgotten is how quickly Coca-Cola snapped up the rights to songs of that generation and carefully regurgiated their beauty (now bristling with carbonated feel-good visuals) on national television, much to the chagrin of certain executives at competing soda companies. Or how the Mama & the Papas convieniently never made it out to California but still was infused with enough guacamole spirituality to render a heartfelt California Dreamin'.

The years roll past ... and now, Generation X is sitting smack on top of the technology that could have made the Yippies, Hippies, and Beatniks a power to be reckoned with. World Wide Web self-publishing, Usenet for the masses, international chat rooms, military grade encryption that fits comfortably on an $0.89 floppy diskette ... anarchy in the making, and enough of it to make the Establishment think twice about handing out those draft notices.

And it's all going to pot, straight to the crapper, as the self-same fellows that made It's A Small World float endlessly in your head push their marketing hype across your color monitor. Let's take a little journey across the Matrix and see what sort of scatology we can uncover ...

Since Coca-Cola has figured so prominently into this essay, why not start with The Coca-Cola Company and see what this almighty American icon can bring to the virtual landscape.

The first thing that causes this wandering reporter to scratch his head is the never-answered question: What marketing wonk comes up with these ideas? Imagine the corporate freshman, straight from the halls of Princeton, clutching his Mr. Pibb ballpoints and humming the corporate fight song, running into the decrepit Vice-President of Marketing between meetings. Great news, J.R., he flashes a full set of dental wonders, we've got the Web page theme. Imagine: comic books! Imagine: Buck Rogers! Imagine: Slim Pickins riding a nuclear bomb to ground zero! Jesus, send this guy back to the mailroom ...

Well, let's wander in a little bit. Notice that the comic is actually a hyperlink ... wait a goddamn minute. In the bottom corner ... can this be? Emblazoned as if the world eagerly awaited the news: "Featuring '95 and quarter results & more!" What the fuck? Like Coca-Cola's profit statement is anything earth-shattering. As if this multinational conglomeration, with a food product so universally recognized and production costs amortized so thin that the accountants double-up the cost reports before wiping, has to worry about quarterly profits.

Is this some fluke? An HTML representation of some minor power struggle between the CFO and the aforementioned marketing wonk? Oh no, not quite. Move onto the next page, and you're presented with a "passport", a piss-poor cover-up for getting you to give the little weasels a full run-down of your whereabouts, including snail mail and email address. What they do with this information eludes me, but, as a word of advice, forge it entirely. No way is Coca-Cola Company going to fill up my email inbox with their stock dividend annoucements and quarterly reports.

Resist the American-bred urge to be wowwed by detailed graphics and glossy layouts.

And, inexplicably, at the bottom of the form, is the sole personal question they're interested in: "Are you a stock holder?" They don't even give a shit if you actually drink the carbonated fabrication they produce, but dammit, if you own stock, well let's roll out the red carpet, Mr. Nelson.

Methinks enough verbage has been wasted on the Coca-Cola Company. Interestingly enough, their arch-nemesis Pepsico doesn't seem to have any sort of net.presence. This completely escapes me. Pepsi and Coca- Cola have been in a marketing tit-for-tat since time eternal. How could Pepsi show such ... restraint?

They've certainly shown more restraint than Sony Corporation. This media meglomaniac is the Bavarian Illuminati to the entertainment industry with it's octopus-like reach into everything transmitted and received. If you smile, laugh, cry, or dance to it, Sony wants to own a piece of it. And they probably manufactured the disc, film, or tape carrying the emotion-tugging masterpiece. And if not, they own the patent on the technology driving the information delivery. (Have the conspiracy people realized this yet?)

This week, Sony's home page features new offerings from Toad the Wet Sprocket, something about the Three Stooges, and (whadda surprise) some sort of interactive tie-in with their mega-hyped Sandra Bullock movie, The Net. Nothing against the Toads or Sandra, but I'm a big Stooges fan myself ... [click]

There's other stuff to check out. Video games, high-tech gear, blah blah blah. Two of the links on the clickable map wind up failing on their name service lookup. Nice going, guys.

The deeper in you move, the more you realize that your $3000 Pentium multimedia dream system has been converted into a full-color catalog viewer. At least Montgomery Ward was decent enough to refund the price of the catalog if you bought something. Sony should be handing out blank checks if they expect me to hang out at their site.

Pages upon pages of spiffy hyper-catalog, with dry color photographs of, well, really cool electronic and home entertainment gear. And to Sony's credit, they don't stick order forms in your face asking when you're going to start buying this great stuff rather than just slaver over it. Well, give them some time, and the credit card forms will begin appearing.

Wander around AT&T's Web Page for more glossy preening. You can download daily press anoouncements -- so what? Is this for journalists too lazy to keep in touch with AT&T's PR folks? I mean, who else would be interested in this crap? Are Ma and Pa going to turn off Matlock and eagerly jump to AT&T's Web page to read about the joint venture with General Magic? And check this out: "Coming soon! Speeches from AT&T executives at trade shows, analyst meetings, and Congressional hearings." Boring.

Try this as a simple experiment. Pick a corporation out of midair -- say, Walt Disney Company -- and point your Web browser at their site. It's usually pretty easy to figure it out if you don't know their domain name. For example, just try http://www.disney.com/ and -- viola -- instant access. (If you can't find what you're looking for after a couple of tries, use a good search engine, like Yahoo's.)

Look around at the new found site, make some mental notes, and try again. Resist the American-bred urge to be wowwed by detailed graphics and glossy layouts. A pattern of emptiness emerges.

Forget what you know, what you think you know about corporate decision makers. All the gab and glare about the Web has just shed immense light on how corporate resources are tossed around like Andrew Jacksons at a Vegas crap table. Rather than gather sufficient statistics which show some sort of cost-effectiveness to advertise on the Web, major multinationals are simply pushing and shoving their way into cyberspace. These high-tech glossies are just the incarnation of spending a lot of money and seeing if something happens.

Interestingly, one of the most lucrative industries with easily one of the largest marketing expenditures is notably absent from the Web. Tobacco companies have simply not set up shop. Searches with Yahoo, WebCrawler, and World Wide Web Worm yielded nada. Corporate tobacconists have skipped town. Must've slipped their mind while they were explaining the non-addictive nature of nicotine to Congress.

Oh, you see the occasional mom-and-pop handrolled cigar store or the association of pipe enthusiasts, but they're the standard home page fare: a couple of black-and-white GIFs of cigars, a bio of the shopkeeper, a snail mail address to order a crate of stogies.

The big boys are nowhere to be found. The tobacco companies didn't leave Dodge City, they never bothered showing up. Keep your eyes on Nabisco's page, who're the latter half of RJR-Nabisco and manufacturers of the illustrious Marlboro brand cigarettes. Right now, it's marked "under construction", but who knows, Nabisco might just start featuring full-color glossies of the Marlboro cowboy riding into the sunset, along with an interactive catalog of Marlboro goodies.

Just kidding. You'll be seeing Velveeta recipies.

Corrections