TV-Industrial complex

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The TV-Industrial complex is a riff by business author Seth Godin on the Military-industrial complex. It describes the cycle of advertising, demand creation and branding that allowed companies to buy ads, generate profits and buy ever more ads in a never-ending cycle.

Godin asserts that beginning in the mid 1990s, the complex began to break down. The decline of the hegemony of the big three FCC sanctioned TV networks meant that consumer attention could no longer be purchased at a reliably low price. Instead of ever-increasing returns from ever-increasing ad expenditures, many organizations found that their boring products and services that had depended on growth through advertising expenditures were now stagnating.