When the #OccupyWallStreet protestors get tired of the financial district, they can always hoof it over to Madison Avenue, where in one of life’s little ironies, Advertising Week is kicking off.
Even as runaway greed is lambasted on Wall Street, festering consumerism is encouraged at the eighth annual seminar/festival/networking event for more than 70,000 advertising professionals and major clients.
As in every past year, multiculturalism in advertising will be applauded yet rarely utilized. One workshop entitled, “Where Are All the Black People?” shows that at ad agencies, things haven’t changed very much since the days of Mad Men. The biggest difference, of course, is that the early Madison Avenue types didn’t have to sit through endless discussion groups about social media “solutions.”
As the #OccupyWallStreet folks choke on tear gas and wave signs about bailouts and being in the 99 percent, ad industry types, who facilitate the consumer desire that lines Wall Street pockets, will be entertained by Andrea Mitchell and Brian Williams of NBC News, along with Steve Harvey, Jennifer Hudson, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Justin Timberlake.
The futility of the entire situation might have been unwittingly captured in this tweet from @KYColChad:
#OccupyWallStreet: If you are tweeting your anger about capitalism on an iPhone, think very hard about what that means…
To which I responded:
If not iPhones, what is the best product on which to tweet your anger over capitalism? #OccupyWallStreet
I would place divorcing ourselves from Wall Street and disconnecting from our mobile devices in the category called, “Putting the Toothpaste Back in the Tube.”
As an advertising professional myself, but one who does not own a T.V., I am often amazed and appalled at the state of our society as depicted and reflected in popular media. But if anybody out there can figure out how to tweet, or how to communicate ideas to lots of other people in general, without supporting either the financial or advertising industries, I’d love to hear the answer.
I empathize. I haven’t watched tv in 17 years. Back in the early 1980s when I attended some seminars arranged by the Harvard Business School, one Professor of Advertising asked our small group what each of us thought of the subject in general. When I responded that I turned avoided it completely and did my own research on anything I wanted to buy, he got visibly angry. I thought about this a long time, and came to the conclusion that I wasn’t supposed to exist. In a well-ordered society, the corporations sold us whatever we needed, and what we needed was supposed to be told to us by Madison Avenue. To deny that, as I did, was heresy.
They’re still the ones who sell us everything: what we own, what we believe, whom we elect to rule over us. No one objects, because while Wall Street is an obvious cancer, Madison Avenue is simply the disease you’ve always had, and come to accept as a normal condition.