Indienomics, schmindienomics
Word of the day is “indienomics”, which American media outlets are now using to describe the age-old advertising industry love of targeting ads at affluent “uber-influencers” under the, again hardly novel, presumption that not all consumers – or “eyeballs” to use the appropriate jargon – are created equal. We’re not sure Don Draper would approve.
According to this promo for US cable film channels IFC and the Sundance Channel, their culturally refined, “independently wealthy” viewers “pride themselves on telling people what to read, what to watch, what to do and what to buy” and therefore doing business with them is simple indienomics. This is all much to the chagrin of the creator of the Indienomics blogspot, which identifies itself as being one of the little guys at the intersection of “culture, commerce and copyright” – in other words, spiritually closer to what MTV would call “Generation P”.
So under the corporate definition of indienomics, you might get thousands of middle class box-setters banging onto everybody they know that The Wire is the best television programme ever made, while under the original definition, proficient YouTubers would no doubt illegally download the next-best-thing before it even premieres on anything as old-school as television, never mind waiting until it’s available in hard copy.
Whatever the hell it actually means, indienomics makes a worthy addition to the ever-expanding canon of “nomics” suffixing catchwords that have been coined over the last 150 years. The current bout of recession-tastic soul searching has popularised such delights as bangernomics, which espouses the art of buying and running old cars on the cheap; eco-nomics, or the money-saving joys of a life spent endlessly cycling and recycling; and chiconomics, which eulogises style on a shoestring budget. Witness Grazia magazine’s straw-clutching use of the latter.
It’s not just the lifestyle press. Freakonomics, the best-selling book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, was dismissed as cute-o-nomics by the Economist, while the BBC’s economics editor Stephanie Flanders blogs under the title Stephanomics (her predecessor Evan Davis favoured Evanomics). Then we have a whole range of political philosophies from Nixonomics to Reaganomics all the way down to Cowenomics (used in the Dáil by Labour finance spokeswoman Joan Burton), which could conceivably be described as a sub-subset of the phenomenon dubbed bubblenomics.
