Adverting Disaster

Hello.

This is Adverting Disaster. This is a blog about the media, commercial advertising, and information communication. The desire to create this blog has existed in my head for quite a while, eternally on my long term planning to-do list, never getting crossed off. Now, on the eve of a new commercial year (it's superbowl sunday), at the dawn of a new governmental administration, in a time of unprecedented uncertainty and upheaval in the both the business and consumer world I'm starting a fire. It's time to burn things down and see what's left standing.

See it all comes back to that title, specifically the use of the word "disaster." That word and it's ilk are getting thrown around a lot lately. Emergency. Crisis. Meltdown. An economy in shambles, a people depressed, afraid, broken on the wheel and in the wallet.

Changes in the way we consume media and use intellectual property have shifted so radically in the past few years (months?) that advertisers, producers, even the talent is scrambling for a way to monetize content. Household brand names are dissolving at a startling rate. Well known products are getting aggressively rebranded. And all this amidst an economic climate where the public is exceedingly wary about how it's going to spend it's currency.

We have reached the Rubicon. This the watershed moment. This is the point in the history of consumption and communication that the lever bent upon it's fulcrum.

But it doesn't have to be all doom and gloom. Desperation breeds desperate attempts, a throwing of ideas against a wall to see what will stick. Some of those ideas are going to be the spearpoint of the next generation of penetrating ideas. For those with the foresight to predict the cresting of the next wave are going to be the demanded, as well they should be. The radical idealists, the forward thinkers, the progressives, these are the vanguards of development.

This is an exciting time, folks. We're going to push things forward.

This blog is about that push. I'm not going to simply document and comment, I'm going to offer solution, and so are you. This is a conversation. This is a forum. Comment freely, advise, detail, relate, anecdote, annotate, get up and over and make it your own. We're all in this together. We can avert disaster. We can alter the course.