purple motes

I've made some additions and revisions to the CS Ad Expenditure Dataset that I posted two weeks ago.  One important addition is alternative figures for U.S. internet advertising, 1997-2007.   See the "internet" spreadsheet in the CS Ad Dataset. This spreadsheet gives the Interactive Advertising Bureau's (IAB) U.S. internet advertising revenue for 1997-2007, as well as U.S. advertising figures for Google (2002-2007), Yahoo (2002-2007), and newspapers (2003-2007).  These additional data show that the Coen internet advertising expenditures for 2004-2007 are far too low.  I've kept the Coen internet figures in the category-structured database because the effect of revisions in the internet figures on other figures isn't clear.

I've made some minor revisions to the pre-1935 advertising figures.  These figures might be of some current interest because they span the Great Depression.   Between 1929 and 1933, U.S. GDP fell 46% and total advertising expenditure fell 54%.  A combination of bad luck, wrong decisions, and shattered faith made that disaster.  It need not happen again, but it could.

David Carson of Husky Media has observed that online video advertising has suffered from having a television ad model imposed on it.  He asks, "why are we blindly accepting that the best way to build online-video markets is by applying an ad model from a completely different medium like television?"  Note that the Coen categorization includes $37.4 billion advertising expenditure in an "other" cateogory in 2007.  For comparison, the IAB recorded $21.2 billion in internet advertising expenditure in 2007, and the Coen figure for broadcast television is $44.5 billion.  The large size of the "other" category indicates that much advertising expenditure is not easily classified.   A wide range of advertising forms already exist, but tend to be underappreciated.

As noted previously, that data are also available in an Excel workbook.

Update: I've added estimated yearly Microsoft online U.S. advertising revenue, 2002-2007, to the Internet sheet in the ad expenditure dataset.

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One of the bureaucrats on the staff here at the Carnival of the Bureaucrats observed with pride some time ago the head of an important government agency entering his agency's headquarters. At the headquarters' entrance are guards who check ID badges after persons swipe through an electronic badge machine.  After clearing the electronic badge machine, without hesitation and with due respect for job assignments, the agency head politely showed his badge to the guard.  The guard then gave him an approving gesture to enter. This is a clear indication of a well-functioning bureaucracy. Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow, nor obsolescence, redundancy, or mighty leaders can deter a bureaucrat from doing her job.

Jeremiah Owyang at his Web Strategy blog celebrates unsung heroes.  He mentions "technology vendors, PR firms, agencies, and even VCs."  His failing to mention bureaucrats is a serious oversight.

Pete Graner at RedVoodoo declares:

I received a comment on my blog, referencing the Kernel Team requiring a LP bug prior to committing a patch to the tree. The person commenting called it "Bureaucracy". ... Its not about bureaucracy, its about accountability.

Mr. Graner has made a common mistake.  The procedure concerns both bureaucracy and accountability.  Both are useful and worthwhile.

Alex Papadimoulis at The Daily WTF celebrates serious fricking bureaucracy.  This is extremely impressive. Our favorite part: "There was a reason that the support rep’s voice sounded so familiar: she was Jessica, and 774-6216 was Jessica’s number."  You have to read it to understand.

Chris, at the inspiring blog "Bureaucracy Now!" offers an uplifting quote for the day:

"Regardless of what happens — if a kid dances on your sand mandala — it’s okay. If everybody in the world had that kind of stability of mind we’d be better off."

All bureaucrats aspire to stability.  It starts with the right mindset.

Azelma Petit at Biz.Edu offers 30 Creative Ways to Fire Someone Who's Not Pulling Their Weight.  Creativity and firing have little relevance for bureaucracy.  Consider this:

14. Fired Fruit Basket – People usually send fruit baskets for appreciation. Why not change the entire meaning of a fruit basket by sending a fruit basket with a “You’re Fired” card? Even though the employee will still be upset, at least they get some fruit out of it.

If we had a sense of humor, we would rate that as 7.2 out of 10 on the standard humor measurement scale.  But bureaucrats don't have a sense of humor.

Texas Politics offers a detailed, factual discussion of Texas goverment bureacracy.  This is the kind of document that should replace silly, vacuous mission statements in leading bureaucratic organizations.

Village Connections has honored supporters of New Zealand's Education Amendment Bill with a Shovel Award.  This distinguished award is for "digging community into a bureaucratic hole." The award citation observers:

The reason for the Shovel is that this Bill will add another layer of bureaucracy and more bureaucrats to the community. ... it is a move away from an environment where children and adults alike develop skills in communicating with one another about whom to trust and in what ways, to one where people are forced to be dependent on bureaucracy.

Community outreach and social responsibility departments at bureaucratic organizations around the world should aspire to receiving such an award.

That's all for this month's Carnival of Bureaucrats. Submit your blog article to the next edition using our carnival submission form. Submissions should conform to the Carnival's regulations. Past editions of the Carnival of Bureaucrats can be found on the Carnival's category page.

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Scientific mind,
discovering your own program,
run this:
a gorilla flings feces at captivated zoo visitors.

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Consider this law:

If a man says to his comrade, either in private or in a public quarrel, "Everyone has sex with your wife," and further, "I can prove the charges," but he is unable to prove the charges and does not prove the charges, they shall strike that man 40 blows with rods: he shall perform the king's service for one full month; they shall cut off his hair; moreover, he shall pay 3,600 shekels of lead.[*]

This written law was established in Assyria about 3100 years ago.  It's a defamation law, but it specifies a highly particular form of defamation.  Did the Assyrian have a written law covering every major type of defamation (you're a bastard, your mother's a whore, you're a clumsy oaf, etc.)?  Most likely not.  "Everyone has sex with your wife" seems to have functioned in Assyrian law as a synecdoche for defamation.

The Assyrian law differs from case law.  The parties to the action are generic "man," "comrade," and "wife."   The law occurs within a list of similarly structured, written laws that make no particular references to historical case judgments.

Particularization apparently was not a generic characteristic of ancient Mesopotamian legal texts.   Ancient Mesopotamian laws combined combined general categorizes of parties with highly particularized actions and punishments.  Whether these laws mattered in practice is a subject of considerable academic debate.  Perhaps these laws indicate that making laws and judging cases were closely connected institutionally in the Assyrian kings' administrative organs.

Note:

[*] Text from the Middle Assyrian Laws, ca. 1076 BCG, of the city of Assur.  See Roth, Martha Tobi, Harry A. Hoffner, and Piotr Michalowski. 1995. Law collections from Mesopotamia and Asia Minor. Writings from the ancient world, no. 6. Altanta, Ga: Scholars Press, p. 159.  The preceeding law: "If a man should say to another man, "Everyone has sex with your wife," but there are no witnesses, they shall draw up a binding agreement, they shall undergo the divine River Ordeal."  The witnesses are most plausibly relevant to uttering the statement, not having sex with the wife.    Evidently, this law concerns a situation where the defamation defendant denies making the statement.  In contrast, the law quoted above includes the defamation defendant asserting that he can prove the wholly implausible statement that "everyone" has sex with the wife.   These laws make most sense together as defining defamation at different levels of insult and injury.  A similar set of laws is organized around the statement, "Everyone sodomizes you."

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Horses mount wheels
and their bodies turn stiff,
gleaming with chrome.
Roads spread like vetch
that stays dry but still grows.

The bottom of the icebox heats up.
Lids pop.  A shouted call crosses
the continent. A light switches
on, then off, then on again, again.

I live, not fearing
death, but wondering:
is my world a candle,
a pyramid, a new Word?

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U.S. advertising expenditure, for various media and type categories across the years 1919 to 2007, is now available in a dataset convenient for extensive analysis.   These data quantify the rise of advertising on radio, on television, in telephone directories (yellowbook), and on the Internet.  They also quantify less widely discussed media for advertising, such as direct mail, billboards and outdoor advertising, and advertising in business papers (trade press).  You can, of course, also create your own categories, such as ad expenditure totals relative to GDP.  Advertising is widely regarded as an important aspect of new media businesses.  This dataset is meant to inform thinking in this time of dramatic changes in the communications industry.

The advertising expenditure data mainly come from Robert J. Coen, now at Magna in the McCann Erickson advertising agency.  Coen has worked for decades putting together advertising expenditure figures.   His advertising data were published in the U.S. Census Bureau's Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1970 (see pages 855-7).    The Television Advertising Bureau has made available online a recent version of Coen's data covering the years 1948 to 2007.   I've augmented that data with Coen data for 1919 to 1947, previously made publicly available on the Internet.  In addition, I've added some categories of advertising expenditure for 1919 to 1934.  These additional figures are based on some Coen data, some data from other sources, and my own estimates.  In recognition of Coen's work, I'll call the dataset the "Coen Structured Advertising Expenditure Dataset," or the "CS Ad Dataset" for short.

The CS Ad Dataset includes various advertising expenditure categories and aggregation schemes.  These are described in the CS Ad Dataset "categories" and "schemes" sheets.  Separating advertising into national and local advertising is possible from 1935.  The category "Television" was divided into "Broadcast TV" and "Cable" in 1990.  The category "Out of Home" replaced the category "Billboards" in 2000, with the former encompassing about three times as much expenditure as the later.  Categorization has become more specific over time.   In 1935, about 20% of advertising expenditure fell within a "Miscellaneous" category.  By 2007, the share of "Miscellaneous" was down to 13%.   To deal with issues of categorization and aggregation, the CS Ad Datset includes records containing the year, two levels of categorization, an aggregation scheme code, and the associated advertising expenditure for all years and categories from 1919 to 2007.   This data structure facilitates analysis using a relational database such as Microsoft Access.  If you don't have such software, you can extract relevant data by re-sorting, cutting, and pasting as best suits your needs.

The quality of the advertising expenditure data merits further analysis.  Since Coen has long worked for an advertising agency, Coen's employer has particular interests that might bias the data.  However, Coen has made the advertising expenditure data widely available for a long time.  Public exposure greatly increases the credibility of the data.

Some advertising expenditure figures have been revised over time.  Between 1975 and 2000, the total advertising expenditure figure for every year prior to 1940 were revised by more than 1%, with the figures for the 1920s revised downward about 15%.  Detailed categories changed more that the totals.  For example, totals between 1935 and 1945 were revised by less than 1.8%, while there was a -6.3% revision for magazine advertising in 1938, and -5.5% to +8.2% in the miscellaneous advertising figures.  Putting aside the most recent year of data, the largest revision to total advertising expenditure for post-WWII years was a 2.5% increase for 1998.  This revision occurred between 2003 and 2008.   The "revisions" sheet in the CS Dataset shows some revision history for the total figures.  Overall, data other than the most recent year appear to be reasonably stable.   Nonetheless, since revisions are ongoing, dating the Coen data used is important for consistently defining figures.

The Newspaper Association of America (NAA) lists mainly Coen data on its website under a page-tab "annual ad volume" (all-media table).  The NAA, however, inserted its own estimates of advertising expenditure in newspapers, an area of advertising for which the NAA has a particular interest. The NAA newspaper advertising expenditure in its all-media table doesn't respect the over-all aggregation scheme of the data.  Specifically, the NAA newspaper advertising figures include online newspaper advertising, while Coen has a separate category for Internet advertising.  For details, see the "NAA Comparison" sheet in the CS Ad Dataset.  In addition, while the NAA inserted its own newspaper advertising expenditure figures, it did not change other Coen figures to account for this change.  Hence the total figures for the NAA all-media table don't add up.  The NAA table also seems to include different revisions of Coen's figures.  Hence the NAA all-media table is't a good quality source for consistent, historical advertising expenditure data.

Note: The CS Ad Dataset is available as an Excel workbook.  See also additional discussion of ad expenditure.

Update: For some additional comparative advertising expenditure data from the U.S. Census Bureau, see U.S. advertising expenditure, 1998-2007.   Here's a review of alternate advertising expenditure data, including IRS data on advertising.

Related: Robert J. Coen, Advertising Data Hero

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Pondering how to make my work matter, I recently stumbled upon this:

Flyvbjerg creatively uses Aristotle, Nietzsche, Foucault, Bourdieu, and others to make his own distinctive argument for an alternative social science. He fuses an Aristotelian concern for phronesis with a Marxist concern for praxis, adding in a Foucauldian critique of Habermas’s preoccupation with consensus to demonstrate that a phronetic social science that can offer a praxis worth pursuing is one that would work within any contextualized setting to challenge power, especially as it is articulated in discourse.[1][2][3][4][5]

Look at that, just two sentences and he's got Aristotle, Nietzsche, Foucault, Bourdieu, Marx, and Habermas lined up.   And it's all articulated in discourse!  Hmm, maybe I gotta get me some of that praxis.

Footnotes:

[1] I didn't make that quote up.  Really I didn't.  If you don't believe me, see Sanford F. Schram, "Beyond Paradigm: Resisting the Assimilation of Phronetic Social Science." Politics and Society, vol. 32, no. 3, September 2004, p. 423.

[2] This quote occurs within a scholarly article arguing for methodological pluralism in political science.   I've got my doubts about political science, whether methodological plural or not.   But I believe in methodological pluralism and try to practice it regularly.

[3] Glad that you're reading these footnotes.  You can learn a lot by reading footnotes!

[4] This blog is a scholarly work.  It has footnotes so that you'll know it's a scholarly work.

[5] Some find God in the details.  Some find God in a transcendent world.  Scholars associated with the Perestroika movement in political science seem to discount the possibility that both approaches are connected in truth.  Even if you're not looking for God, you can still try a second sailing to enlarge your social science philosophy.

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Comfort is a dark, quiet night
so dark that nothing
you don't light can be seen
so quiet as to quell
even the memory of a scream.

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