Why Madison Avenue Is Over

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the dissemination of “happy PR” messages is not willful deception. It is simply in the DNA of the corporate culture to promote the assets side of the balance sheet and play down the liabilities. After all, the customer is never wrong in his desire to have his deservingness validated.

A corporate PR person once nearly suffered an embolism when I advised her CEO that his company was “about to be [@!$%*!] by adversaries.” I was admonished that terms like [@!$%*!] and “adversaries” were not used at, uh, WussCorp. “What terms are used here?” I asked. “We don’t have adversaries. We have stakeholders.” “OK, then,” I said: “You’re about to be given a Swedish massage from some stakeholders.”

No sale. There were plenty of PR firms lined up around the executive suite ready to tell WussCorp that to know them is to love them.

I've been through many corporate scandals, and I am convinced that the provenance of most of  is not greed per se, but the sheer incapacity to deliver—or even imply—bad news. 
This absence of negativity has trickled down to many in the under-40 set whose take on our new Postmodern Depression is something like, “This Wall Street stuff sucks. Oh, and did you see that new hi-def flat-screen Sony’s gonna have out by Christmas?!”

Indeed, for many late boomers and X and Y-ers, recent American history has been a series of Chicken Little false alarms. The apocalyptic “Y2K” was a dud, there were no domestic terrorist attacks after 9-11, the stock market rebounded after the 1990s tech bubble burst, the Iraq War is happening, like, somewhere, but flat-screen TVs have gotten sleeker in spite of everything.
Despite the current fashion predicting a sequel to the Great Depression, my sense is that the optics of the one now upon us will be different.  If the lasting image of the 1930s is photographer Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother” holding her head in her hand as her children cling to her, the iconic image of the Postmodern Depression will be—click—that of a recent college graduate wearing flip-flops and a catatonic expression, gazing through the window of the Apple store in an upscale shopping mall at THE MOMENT HE REALIZES HE ACTUALLY CAN’T HAVE the latest i-Booger. Like, at all. Oh, and you’ll be living with mom and dad for another 10 years.

I empathize with my professional cousins on the marketing side of the communications aisle, because I’d hate to pitch Toyota on the slogan, “Camry—Because it’s so over.”  Still, one ingredient in the antidote to our current woes will be disabusing ourselves of the equation that wanting = needing = getting.

As Chuck Palahniuk searingly wrote in his book, Fight Club, “You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake. You are the same decaying organic matter as everyone else, and we are all part of the same compost pile.”

If you find that passage as much of a downer as I did, well, Cheer up, Charlie. Just be glad you’re you.