Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand I’m back. Took me a couple days to get re-acclimated to my schedule and task load..

We all knew it would happen sooner or later in the era or intellectual property rights, ownerships, and at-home services. The retail model for physical acquisition of “soft” goods is dead. If I had to guess, I would suspect that the final iteration of this practice will be flash drives, roughly the size of a stick of gum, that will replace the current offerings of DVD’s, CD’s, video games and the like. But even this fad will be a short spike as the tide of the web spills into the living room. Books? Nah, too nostalgic. Books will last on like the Redwoods of the 21st century for the same reason, they’re ancient and treasured. I knew we were destined for an entertainment industry without hard copies back when I saw lines of patrons shell out hundreds on the latest version of Office 95. It occurred to me that they were buying nothing more than a small plastic disk, that AOL couldn’t GIVE away, and a user license.

This is a concept that we are seeing more and more in all aspects of modern life. If you work at a company, as I do, you probably get paid via electronic form; just numbers in an account. I get no physical money; in fact, I spend my ‘numbers’ without ever having seen a copper plated zinc Lincoln.

Large media peddlers are seeing this trend as well. Gee, why spend millions on the physical? What may follow is the advertising industry. Stationary devices digitized like billboards, the sign on the sides of busses, the newspaper clipping above the urinal. The advertisers will pay for the delivery when they see the return. There is a giant recycle bin next to our community mail box. Every day I get the mail I watch others exercise the same ritual as me. ‘Personalized’ mail is extracted and fistfuls of unread, untargeted paper advertisements are literally dumped into the recycle bin. With 20 billion pounds of paper ads thrown away each day I believe a digital revolution may be in order.

Stop thinking of the newest generation of adolescence as a derivative of larger more partitioned markets. They are in themselves an incredibly powerful, yet problematic, contribution to the world’s market. According to polls conducted by Harris Interactive, a leading marketing research affiliate, American teens spent approximately 176 billion in 2005 alone. With regret to facets of social harmony, harnessing this market of youth means to have some influential bearing, almost always towards the negative. Statistics have shown us that anything visually gratifying or uncensored is marketable, especially to a demographic as unseasoned as aspiring adults. The trend is to tap into a feed of uninhibited pleasure and promote degradation of self worth in order to bait profits. The most obvious example may be the erection of pop idols. From an industry standpoint, the reward in revenue verses the miniscule initial investment of endorsement far outweighs any moral objection to a sinking standard. Often, if not always, these strategic scarecrows are implemented as redirects for silent promotion of products or services. Marketing sharpshooters are searching for advocates to convey the successful sublimation of trend-driven youth culture, graphed with the calculated responsiveness of eclipse marketing in an effort to establish an underground subculture where the product is widely accepted and endorsed.

Youth is the freshest of the farm-raised demographic, trained from birth how to think, what to eat, how to dress, and what to smell like. Not by kin, but by the fruits of a corporate staff meeting. The method of delivery is articulated culminations of mass communication, mindless entertainment, and subtle advertising. America, the world over, can only witness as the bombardment of alluring influence to, “buy into what we sell,” seeps in like liquid from television and the computer, on the side of a bus, and through air waves. The communication is pounding, but at times, makes no sound.
“Understanding the consumer’s mind…comes down to the question of appealing to and enhancing desire,” Stuart Ewen. The idea is to give a consumer just a little more than they want to see in order to give the impression that the purveyor of an announcement is on the same page. A Successful visual, or implied sense of sex, popularity, beauty, status, power, or any other attribute a young consumer desires, can easily entice an individual of developing character into an environment engineered for nothing more than to extract income from its occupants. This environment can be created and renewed between songs, or on a commercial. It can be charged with a laugh or energized by a fright. A second look begs us to identify, “that was cool.” Discovery of where it came from, and how to obtain it, are logically the next steps to the deliberate equation.

Creating a willingness to observe a message is the first, and most important, step in capturing revenue. Engaging, pleasurable diversity is quintessential to its magnetic power of allure. Pushing the boundaries of good taste has become the norm, but shock holds attention longer. The window of delivery is therefore expanded with the only casualty being integrity, not a source of revenue. Teens are hungry for the opportunity to show the world that they are adults, and pollution marketing is hungry to take the proof to a lower level, so they will listen. What is dirty becomes raunchy and what is violent becomes belligerent. The longer the model is in place, the more damage it does. Rotting our youth’s moral vitality was never the intention of the marketing analysts, just as mail was not intended for coupons, e-mail was not intended for spam and newspapers were not intended for ads, or were they?

Rebellion is another watermark of a successful selling point to the, so called, misunderstood demographic. It is in our very nature to challenge authority. Perhaps it is some portion of the psyche attempting to break from the constant demands of sober routine. What is known is that every so often surges of this primal defiance influence our decisions. Younger audiences, at times, find it more difficult to restrain. Marketing franchises are well aware of this impulse phenomenon, and like all things, seek to feed from its pull. To make an advertiser more mentally approachable by somehow embellishing their disposition of acceptance, associates a youthful audience with the prospect that, on some level, that “person” understands them. Association and acceptance are key elements to establishing rapport and building upon client credibility. A version of trust, out of its many forms, has to be earned by the advertiser, ultimately moving them into a position of empowerment and setting the stage for their tacit gimmick to take hold. Deflation of respect for authorities and anti-sterilization of conformity are but a few of the many weapons in the advertising media’s arsenal of underhanded self promotion. This trajectory is implemented solely to win the petition of an alpha trend setter amongst his sea of peers. The vacuum is targeted directly at our youth, and the social lemmings that identify with them. With the pawns in place, one can only hope that the barrage of solicitation stay on topics of commerce, and not wander into more invasive, potentially political issues.

With such devastating repercussions looming overhead, what challenge can we bring forth to the perpetuators of this downward spiral? Nothing, the machine is working as intended. It would be naive to ask for an abandonment of a thriving business model. The call to action must come from the inside. Accountability must not rest on the stacks of an indestructible, nearly self-automated, marvel of profit-harvesting ingenuity. If we ask the television to raise our youth, it will. From the first time we sit our children in front of the tube we are plugging them into the machine with our own hands. Years later when the resonation of impact cannot be undone, we must ask ourselves, has the machine reached beyond its boundaries, or did we meet it halfway?

American commerce is a catalyst for the solidification of market for markets inasmuch as a fire’s insatiable need for consumption in order to thrive. Imagine for a moment consumers as fire and the goods they consume as fuel, in its various forms. Left to necessity, fire will still consume, and fuel will still be consumed, but with strategic acceleration for added consumption, and disposable facets intended to quickly become obsolete, additional revenue can be generated. Factors outside the realm of sheer necessity must play a significant role in the consumer’s choice to obtain a good. Successful sublimation to convey a sense of sex, empowerment, sophistication, beauty, status, or any other attribute a consumer desires to posses, acts as an accelerant to the flame, further intensifying the rate of consumption. Implementation of desirability to a product arouses a primal urge of possession that need not be internally justified in the actual decision making process of a purchase. A utopian model to maximize the inferno would be cheaply fabricated, yet highly stylized products containing disposable components. Thus tactics upon the subconscious through understated implication and implicit innuendos compel us to do what fire does best, consume.

In the past, products were often overbuilt and lasted far too long. While serving the consumer with quality, it was an inefficient process of consumption, drawing much resource with little room for replacement expenditure. The model had to be modified to incorporate both aspects of disposability, and plans for a replacement, giving the consumer an option to upgrade before the product concluded its useful lifespan. The underlining motivation would be based on, among others, the emotional feeling of inadequacy in the product a consumer may already own, and not in true necessity. This also, at least partially, instigated the need for faster manufacturing of similar, but improved, products. Products need to be replaced as quickly as possible, never repaired, in regard to retail commerce as the profiteer. Proprietary parts and disposable components of products became the name of the game. A toilet wand with flushable heads comes to mind. Quality of construction and materials has been superseded by fast trends, distinctive styling and the silent pressure to own the best. With the fleeting integrity of today’s product we somehow seem assured that we are buying into something newer. Ideally, there must be more than just increased efficiency to a product’s replacement. The upgrade needs to personify enhancement, and indicate through updated styling, that it is better suited, more advanced, and in all regards a superior product to the one you own. Simply stated, you shouldn’t have to read an item’s description or see the price tag; but by looking at the two side by side, a product and its successor, know beyond a shadow which one is better.

Egon Friedell may have coined it best, “There are no realities anymore, there is only apparatus…. Neither are there goods any more, but only advertisements.” Another, equally important, apparatus of American marketing that often times dodges the radar is the cloaked tactic of fear as a marketing agent. Aside from the obvious defensive implements, fear has sold us homes in nicer neighborhoods, new, as opposed to used, cars, anti-virus programs, anti-aging creams, surge protectors, sheet protectors and literally hundreds of thousands of unrelated items. Fear can be argued to be the opposite of desire and perhaps even the Yin, or dark, of the two major “manufactured” tools of American merchandising. The two are joined in this illustration and an improved business model, igniting both a sense of desire for the new product and fear of the old product being inadequate, begins to emerge.

Subdivision and specialty increase consumption by creating an additional need for articulated replacement parts and upgrades that are supposed to streamline and optimize our lives. Yet the true trend is that of additional expense. One would have to conclude that if full “optimization” were to occur, we would find ourselves in a disposable world. Disposable sheets for the toilet seat, one-time use cat boxes, throw-away silverware and shoe covers. The growing sub classification of markets into supporting markets insures that consumption will never reach its saturation. Throw into the mix the sexy allure of new technologies and improved styling, and coveted products become all the more irresistible. As long as consumers can finance, charge or even afford to upgrade, the ever expanding depth of calculated necessity promises to make it more hygienic, less of a hassle, and more fun to use.