Anyone else throw up in their mouth a little after reading this? It seems that advertising will necessarily hit a sort of event horizon eventually. When half the economy is spent promoting the other half of the economy, whats left? Since corporations are trying to insinuate themselves into every part of peoples lives, is it possible that a sort of new corporate feudalism could be in the cards? With conglomerates able to offer a variety of services, this seems plausible, even more so when one considers the talk of 'privatization' of federal and local services.
Also, apparently the '00s are the new '80s. Everyones in to brands, health trends are running amok, video games are the new hotness and even cocaine is making a resurgence. WTF people. Seriously.
Considering this is our last year, it seems like a career in an ad agency will be a career spent being a shameless huckster and pest to society.
My theory is that you can't kill the brand, simply because the human mind is set up to make associations. Some kind of branding will always come through to make value associations with the indentity of a company, and people will readily accept those associations if there is even a bit of truth to them.
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so the inevitable question: how does one respond to this situation? give in and accept a life of being a "target"? go live in a wooden shack? infiltrate the system and change it from within? refuse to work for corporations? we can't just go about our lives, pretending the situation doesn't exist. at the conference i attended last weekend, one of the main stage speakers said we should move from designing artifacts to designing consequences. how would that shift the how, what, and why of our design work?
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