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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Feb.8, 1996
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Perhaps you're wondering what the owners of U.S. big businesses are doing with the money saved from laying you off and eliminating most of your health-care coverage--if you're lucky enough to still have it.
Well, wonder no more. They're spending it big time.
No, not just on themselves. On television commercials.
At a rate of $40,000 a second.
That's what the National Broadcasting Corporation charged companies to advertise their products and services during the Jan. 28 broadcast of the Super Bowl, a football championship game.
A few corporate spokespeople admitted the rate was "a little pricey." Still, over two dozen firms lined up to fill NBC's financial coffers anyway--all in the hope that the advertisements would translate into customers.
NBC sold these companies--which included Nike, Mastercard, Pepsi-Cola, Johnson & Johnson and the National Pork Producers Council--58 half-minute units of commercial time.
The price tag for a 30-second slot: $1.3 million. And that's not including the money the companies paid just to produce their commercials.
All in all, big business shelled out at least $30 million dollars for about a half-hour's worth of commercials.
But the buck doesn't stop there, of course. Advertising dollars are a mainstay of capitalism, used to prop up TV networks, radio stations and newspapers across the country-- and overseas too.
The advertising companies that make the ads and commercials are a multi-billion-dollar industry. Their job is to convince you to buy product A as opposed to product B- -or products C, D, E and so on.
This is the beauty of capitalism. The bosses will spend money produced from your labor to get you to buy, buy, buy, while at the same time insisting that your wages are just too high, high, high.
Think about this as you struggle to stretch out your paycheck--or as you wonder whether you'll even see another paycheck.
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