The other day, I wandered into a 7/11 wanting chocolate. I didn’t know which candybar I wanted, I hadn’t decided. And so I stood there, in a colourful aisle surrounded by candy and snacks, looking at boxes and boxes of chocolate bars, mulling over my decision. I surveyed all the screaming colours and smiling cartoons, eventually deciding that I wanted a Kit-Kat.

As I was reaching for the candybar, I was blindsided with a flash of introspection. Out of all the options, why was I picking Kit-Kat?

It was as if all the candybars in that 7/11 were a million tiny marketing execs, dressed in suits in their candybar colours, all yelling at the top of their lungs, clamouring for attention like stockbrokers right before the closing bell. As my hand drew closer, the tiny red marketing men of Kit-Kat cheered and claimed victory, the losers threw a tantrum, moaned, and went back into a huddle to figure out how to yell louder at the next guy who comes down the aisle.

Consumers are horribly undermatched

So much time, energy and money is spent in our society to funnel consumer behaviour into a desired course of action. People devote entire careers to figuring out how to make people buy their candybars. Marketers are in meetings, watching people in fake shopping labs, staying late at work away from their families, so that they can learn how to make strangers think that Axe Bodyspray will increase their virility or that McDonald’s is an essential part of every childhood.

I became horribly sick at the thought that I was starting a career where my sole purpose would be to make people believe that they can’t live without Brand X.

It was in this moment that I realized marketing is evil. Whenever you step into a grocery store aisle, your wits are against the wits of millions of Marketers, armed with consumer tracking studies and pilot tests and multi-city research and loads and loads of statistics.

Soulless Commerce

Manipulation and fakery of the finest details takes place on a daily basis so that Jane and Joe Consumer will pick Brand X.

I thought about all the 30-second ads on TV, and all of the focus groups, rewrites and reshoots that go into them in an effort to exert maximum consumer influence.

I thought about all the billboards and posters on the street and in magazines and how incredibly manufactured it all was, how the models in the pictures were hand-picked from thousands, then tweaked and photoshopped, optimizing appeal for the target audience.

I thought about the creeping, unstoppable march of marketing into our personal lives, and how any blank crevasse of public domain is being claimed under the flag of Advertising. Those miniature yelling ad execs are not just in our grocery aisles, they’re on our gas pumps, in our tv shows, and even on our parking stripes.

I thought about how powerful brands have become, from Nelly naming his daughter Chanel to basketball teams named Burger King Whoppers.

I thought about how nothing is authentic anymore. Marketing has reduced everything to design-by-focus-group and popular culture is usurped to increase Brand Awareness and ROI. Everything wonderful and real became reduced to soulless statistics.

All I wanted was some damn chocolate and instead I got depressed about my career. I needed to take a step back.

The Necessary Evil

Marketing is a field of mercenary psychologists. We are people who are continually trying to figure out what makes consumers tick, so we can get more money. I thought: Is that really so bad? Isn’t that the essence of business?

Marketing is inevitable. There will always be competition and there will always be a need to prove your worth in relation to competitors.

Farmers in tribal villages, fourth graders battling for class president and entrepreneurs seeking funding all rely on marketing. The American health care debate is a fierce battleground of ideologies, and both sides need marketing. Marketing answers the consumer question: Why should I pay any attention to you?

If I lived in complete isolation from media my entire life and wandered into 7/11 looking for chocolate, I, as a consumer, will still use marketing to guide my decision. I may not have been exposed to ads, posters and billboards for the candybars, but I would evaluate packaging…shape…name…price… to make a choice. All of that is marketing.

The Root of Evil

The ugliness of Marketing is that it cheapens so many things, all for an extra dollar. Remember Chocolate Rain? Marketing execs found something that was popular, so they decided to throw money at Tay Zonday and make Cherry Chocolate Rain:

At 8 million views, I’m sure it achieved Coke’s marketing objectives. But there is something disheartening about taking something organic and authentic and slapping brand names all over it.

Gen Y and the Push-Pull

Marketing works when an intersection exists where the brands push and the consumer pulls. Generation Y is living in a time where for the first time, the consumer can control the corporate push. Tivo and Adblock are testaments to this ability.

This selective screening just causes brands and Marketers to yell even louder, causing an escalating arms race between push and pull. This is a strange battle because ultimately marketers and consumers need each other.

Is Marketing Evil?

Is marketing evil? Absolutely, but only in the same way that the gun or the printing press is evil. It is a tool that takes whatever form its owner wants it to take. Power is afforded to whoever uses it.

As the threshold of marketing and corporatization pushes deeper into our personal lives, the only hope I can have is that in my lifetime, I don’t see parents selling naming rights for their children to GoldenPalace.

photos by s2art, marketingfacts

Gen X-ers had a little more fun. They could’ve emailed each other over 28.8 or used their pagers to send 1-sentence messages back and forth.

Here’s what Generation Y uses to stay in touch.

To an outsider, it can be a confusing to understand how Gen Y uses those channels just to talk to each other. After all, Boomers just had three channels and they made friends just fine.

To put things in context, here’s what my communication habits are like and how I use the above.

Looking at that chart makes me envy my father’s generation. They didn’t have to worry about drunk texts. Or having personal information all over the internet.

Honourable mentions for Blackberry PINs and Twitter.

I don’t think Gen Y has an appreciation of the permanence of the internet. Once you upload a piece of your life — a blog post, a picture, a video of your cat dancing on YouTube — it’s online FOREVER. I’ve had a Facebook account for about 3 years now, and it only recently dawned on me that there are pictures of me that I’ll never be able to really delete, as they’re stored in a server farm, in a datacenter somewhere, backed up several times over several hard drives, housed in a building guarded with security and alarms. Mark Zuckerberg owns those pictures as much as I do.

The Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse

Dear reader, we have probably never met…but you can write my obituary. All you need is the login information for the sites that I use.

Let’s say you got your hands on my Google login. You would learn a ridiculous amount of information about me:

• GMail: who I know and what we talk about
• Google Search: things I’ve thought about and looked for
• Google Maps: where I’ve been
• Google Calendar: a detailed list of what I’ve been doing in the past year, complete with date and location

You could also have the following if you accessed my Facebook:

• Wall and Messages: conversations with people I know
• Photos: evidence of what I’ve done, where I’ve been and with who
• Events: date and location of events I’ve attended (can cross-reference with Photos)
• Relationship Status: who I’ve been involved with, the type of relationship and for how long
• Personal info: birthday, interests, activities, education, work history

Combine my Facebook data with my Google data and forget the obituary, you have enough to write a small autobiography complete with pictures and memorable quotes from friends.

the girl Riot recently got me thinking about signing up for Twitter, and in the process, made me realize the following information about me could be publicly available:

• What I’m thinking
• What I just did
• Where I am
• What I am going to do

Google and Facebook already have an intimate detail of my life up to the present. Twitter kicks things into overdrive and brings strangers into this surreal fifth dimension by letting them inside my mind, as they can read about what I’m thinking about to the second.

Get Over Yourself, Dave

I was one of those people who were vehemently anti-Facebook when it first became available. Like all anti-Facebook people, I eventually learned that resistance was futile and got an account.

My capitulation was fortunate, as Facebook has tremendous value in my social life. I quickly got over the hesitation of posting pictures and writing messages that could be seen by everyone. Once I realized that no, Nigerian scammers weren’t going to somehow use that info to scam my bank account, and no, my body parts weren’t going to be secretly harvested while I was asleep, I became more comfortable using Facebook.

It’s a weird lesson Gen Y is learning. Trade in your privacy for really cool social toys. Sooner or later, there’ll be no such thing as a private life, and things that rely on mystery will be dead. I am a firm believer that blind dates and high school reunions will cease to exist.

Despite all this, I’m giving Twitter a shot. I figure that as long as I make sure my boss doesn’t see my tweets while I’m supposed to be home with the flu, I should be ok.

Some Gen Y-ers are forming communities to celebrate anorexia (pro-ana websites). Pro-ana people have even coined their own buzzword for the lifestyle, calling it thinspiration (thinspo for short). Videos are shared on YouTube, blogs are plentiful and discussion forums are only a search away.

I was amazed when I came across the NYT blog linked above. In previous generations, pro-ana people could not assemble so easily and empower themselves. Today, they can gather online and have open and honest dialogues with each other. Parents and guidance counselors be damned, they have found people who like them and understand them. Together, they can celebrate their lifestyle proudly.

I like how pro-anas can share their experiences and advice to help each other. The part that scares me is that oftentimes this advice is how to harm yourself quicker and easier.

With great power comes great responsibility.

photo from [C]appry

I was having a convo about P2P with a Gen X friend who can’t bring herself to download music. It’s just something she can’t do; whenever she considers about doing it, guilt takes over and she feels that something is inherently wrong with it . It’s guess it’s like the feeling I get when I think about trying to watch Fox News.

To satisfy her music fix, an exchange of money has to take place. She has to go to a record store, Amazon or iTunes so she can sleep at night.

Not me. Here’s how music gets on my computer/iPod:

1. I hear about music. The primary way I discover music is through friends who tell me that I have to listen to an artist. If I’m away from my laptop, I take a mental note or input it on my phone so I can follow up later.
2. I sample it somewhere first. Even though all it takes is a couple of clicks to get an entire album (or in some cases, entire discographies), I still want to see if it’s worth my time. I’ll head to YouTube to check out a few tracks, or use a service like Songerize.
3. P2P. If I like it enough, I’ll head over to the P2P site of choice and download.

If I’m already online when I hear about the artist, this process takes maybe 5-10 minutes from recommendation to download. I’m willing to bet a lot of Gen Y downloaders follow these three steps.

I miss the process of buying CDs. Downloading takes all the mystery and excitement out of stepping in a music store and thinking about the potential of awesomeness that awaits you. I miss swearing at the shrinkwrap that refused to come off, I miss playing the CD and hoping track one would blow me away and I miss the weird plastic smell of the album booklet.

In the time it took for my friend to hem and haw about how downloading music relates to her moral compass, I’ve already seen a few music videos, downloaded an album or two, and reminisced about the good old days.

Antonella Barba from American Idol, Disney’s Vanessa Hudgens and “Hannah Montana” Miley Cyrus. Celebrities designed to be wholesome, talented role models. Celebrities whose reputations were tainted by having sexually explicit material from their past leak to the media.

It’s a sign that the tides of sexual attitudes are changing. Indiscretions are willingly being captured. In fact, some sex scandals are entirely manufactured with the intent of drumming up PR (why, Screech, why?).

Us normal, every day folk may not have our dirty laundry aired on Entertainment Tonight — but we’re choosing to put last weekend’s bar shenanigans and other potentially incriminating pictures on Facebook. It’s the inevitable inflation of sexual message thresholds that occurs in every generation.

The stakes are raised with every generation. Some Boomers grew up to the sight of Elvis’ hips being censored. My kids won’t even blink at a sex tape being released.

It’s no secret that Generation Y doesn’t blink when it comes to downloading music. The story of the day is not that teenagers and twentysomethings are loading their iPods with unpurchased music.

I consider myself a veteran digital native; I remember the internet as it was through a 14.4 modem. But I was astonished at the level of piracy that goes on today: a study concludes that 95% of Gen Y engage in piracy.

In the short-term, the music industry business model is nothing less than doomed. We all point and laugh, ridiculing the executives for their flat-footed ineptitude, but no one actually provides any solutions. Perhaps we’re all still angry at them for overpricing CDs and DVDs, so we smugly smile as the industry implodes. On a side note: Generation Y isn’t buying CDs either.

I encourage you to think about the consequences. At some point, artists will need to be compensated for their work; a concept I’m not sure youth understand when they hop on Limewire and download Miley Cyrus’ latest album.

The challenge for the music industry is more than thinking about how to monetize consumer behaviour. Another challenge lies as they argue for their own relevance; especially in these times where Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails continue to push for the industry’s obsolesence. There’s also a question of making consumers realize that someone has to pay these artists to produce music.

Until someone makes a compelling argument — be it Reznor or the RIAA — brokep and ThePirateBay have Gen Y’s attention.

We can all recall the teenage awkwardness of being seen at the mall with your mom. It’s always a strange feeling when you get a Facebook friend request from someone from another generation. Many Generation Y users see social networks as a sandbox for their indiscretions — so how do they respond to a request from someone they know, but outside their immediate peer group? Many millennials are not pleased with how older folk are signing up for social networks.

Reading the comments from that article raises some interesting talking points. Facebook is such a fantastic tool for keeping in touch that it was inevitable for all age groups to join the fun. Who are we to prevent our aunts, bosses, teachers from getting on Facebook? They have lives, friends and pictures to share.

After all, it is their generation that built the internet, along with the iPod, cellphones…and every other digital thing we take for granted. Who are we to be ashamed to let them in? This is just another generational clash, but unlike anything we’ve seen before. Normally, when the soccer moms take on a trend, it dies a quick death (see: Macarena, along with the phrases “Bling Bling” and “You Go Girl”). But no one is predicting social networks to go away any time soon.

When it came to media, and especially television, it just wasn’t cool to have an accent. Most sitcoms depicted the “foreigner” as slightly bizarre (for anyone that remembers Latka from “Taxi”) or innocently naive (Fez from “That 70s Show” is a good enough example). But despite their shortcomings and head-shaking foolishness they always offer up one common element- humour.

Here’s a short list in no particular order of ads that include people or characters with accents:

1. ING Direct. The duke of banking “Frederick” urges you to ‘save your money’. If you are anything like me it took you quite awhile to figure out he was Dutch.
2. Alexander Keith’s. Since the charges of child pornography reigned down on their man the beer maker’s have changed their style just a bit. Now people must get permission from a statue that still has some sort of accent.
3. Extra gum. The Scottish piece of gum that comes to life – and is pissed off when he does.
   
4. Kia. Loaded with yahoo’s!, this Australian mascot was able to make even the non-conforming Goths enjoy an adventure through the Outback.
5. Every tropical beer and liquor imaginable. Brava, Marca Bavaria, and Malibu to name a few. Cheersh! (I know Grolsch is Dutch, but come on, who doesn’t love that guy?)
6. Boston Pizza. Ok, I cheated a bit here but I felt justice must be served. I’ll bite my tongue a bit and conclude that Boston Pizza simply got lazy and figured they would give this character a chance – a sort of low risk high reward strategy. “Louie the manbearpig” as I like to refer to him as, is Boston Pizza’s new promotional character. A marketing executive must have caught the 1980s family comedy ‘Meet the Henderson’s’ over the weekend and got the idea. I guess they figured Louie wouldn’t have a problem shaking customer’s hands – sorry Howie.

Most of the products listed, with the exception of ING Direct primarily target Generation Y (a case could also be made for Kia). So what explains this recent surge in accent-related marketing? Is there an increase in humour-directed marketing?

My guess is that it is a fad that was made quite popular by Alexander Keith’s and their child-loving, label-peeling nazi mascot.

Another guess is that the use of accents in humour-related advertising is more of a North American phenomenon. Now I have absolutely no basis for this assumption, but is a Canadian speaking an Indian dialect half as funny as an Indian speaking English is?

The real reason probably lies with the most basic advertising problem – noise. There are so many brands, so many commercials, and so many ways to access information nowadays. So, how do we get our message out to the consumers?

Well, for Generation Y in particular, it has to be funny or have some sort of sex appeal, and preferably both. But hey, why don’t we just make up a character, give it an accent and we can all have a laugh? The problem is now it is not unique. And when something isn’t unique anymore it isn’t different. And when it isn’t different it just isn’t cool.

I think this is a hilarious phenomenon. I would have loved to see this in the olden days, if only to see the evolution of brand attitudes. Imagine Beethoven naming “Symphony no 9″ something like “Cabernet Sauvignon Requiem” or reading a Shakespearean play that name-drops a Ye Olde Whiskey as his sauce of choice.

Make no mistake, this is an effective tactic, even on the supposedly media-savvy kids of Gen Y. This kind of advertising strolls through the front door of our minds, however blatant it may be. It’s wrapped in the harmless cocoon of the song-du-jour, which we are probably singing along to anyway.

The most mentioned brand names in songs in 2005 (wiki):

1. Mercedes automobiles
2. Nike
3. Cadillac automobiles
4. Bentley automobiles
5. Rolls-Royce automobiles
6. Hennessy cognac
7. Chevrolet automobiles
8. Louis Vuitton fashion
9. Cristal champagne
10. AK-47 rifles

Interestingly, despite Jay-Z’s well-known boycott of Cristal, the brand holds on to retain a spot in the top 10.

Even more interesting is the appearance of AK-47 rifles. Somewhere 50 Cent is laughing for sneaking an instrument of death in among a list of luxury items.