The Adnostic

I have a background in the traditional sciences, biology namely, and it has been ingrained in my head from the first days of learning proper methodology and healthy skepticism is that observation changes the behavior/outcome of that which is observed. The researcher's interaction with the subject, animate or inanimate, has an effect on the results observed.

Research was known to me as a very clinical and hands-off process. The last thing you ever wanted to do was effect the results either through carelessness, bias, or just poor methodology. Distance was to give perspective to the research process. It also made research a very dry and unexciting prospect.

Then I came across the idea of participant observation through a blog post on PSFK about from the KSU Anthropology Department, best known for his Machine is Using Us video. He states that the only way to really understand a cultural phenomenon is to participate in it yourself:

I have to agree with him on this even though it goes against much of traditional research technique. For one thing, part of the whole point of having a social media presence is to be observed and to be noticed, therefore a researcher's public observation of a subject would be of minimal consequence to the outcome.

There is another part to researching online behavior that I think is essential. You cannot possibly know what is going on out there unless you experience it for yourself, and even then, as Jenka will firmly attest, your experience (assuming your are 25+ years of age) will be far different than that of a thirteen year old. Know that going in. All of those "gifts" and application invitations on Facebook that you may see as nothing but spam and inbox clutter are means of social commerce and standing to a teenager.

You can't expect to poke around a social network for five minutes and walk away with a full understanding of how it works. You have to make a real commitment to digging in . You have to get your hands dirty.

Soundtracks add drama, joy, suspense, and just pure emotion to otherwise ordinary scenes. Many Hollywood movies would be nothing without the manipulating brilliance of their film score. Take the opening sequence from Space Odyssey for example:

If you were to mute the audio it wouldn't be much. It would actually be pretty boring and unmemorable, but the music makes you sit up and take notice. It is a preparation for what is to come.

Another of my favorite scenes is when Amelie helps a blind man:

Without soundtrack it could seem nervous and evil, like she's taking advantage of him. With the soundtrack you feel his surprise and joy at being shown the world around him.

Now what if we were to use a soundtrack to infuse an object with suspense and meaning; like what Bullet did with the Audi R8 for the launch in Brazil. A car that Brazillians knew nothing about suddenly was fleshed with anticipation, power, and lest we forget the contribution orchestra itself, prestige.

Brilliant luxury marketing that is doing quite well as a viral. I just wish they spent the extra cash to have the full long format available.

It did take longer than last year, but Heather LeFever, patron saint planning industry perspective, has finally published the results from the 2008 planner survey.

(I suggest going to the SlideShare page and viewing the presentation full screen. It's fairly dense.)

Not only is this a great help for determining salary expectations, but I was ever so glad that this year she included the answers from open ended questions to planning directors on career and salary negotiation advice:

"Never tell your current salary. You deserve what your skills and talent pull in the market, not what looks better next to your old salary."

"Women need to be stronger, firmer, and ask for what they want. Even if it's uncomfortable."

"Articulate your value."

"Get everything in writing."

On a sad note, job satisfaction is down and people looking to go to another agency within the next year are up. Good for recruiters and good for me I suppose, but bad for agencies and clients who want to maintain an experienced and informed relationship.

Richard Huntington was surprised by the lack of job satisfaction in the US compared to the UK (which did its own survey via the IPA). His advice - we all pack up, move to the UK, and have above average job satisfaction for the rest of our lives. Kind of like the children of Lake Woebegone. Happy to. Glad to. When can I start?

On another note, I found this great job listing for Saatchi S. If you have ten years experience as a planner and wish to help brands become better citizens of our much abused planet, then have a go. Lord knows I would love the opportunity to cleanse my soul with devising green marketing initiatives.

Is being green a truly sustainable movement or just a trend? Are we all guilty of greenwashing ourselves?

According to a recent consumer segmentation study, the majority of people (33%) with any inclination towards being green are environmental fence sitters. They weigh the costs and benefits of each issue and decide for or against accordingly. If an item costs significantly more money, or an action takes significantly more effort, they unlikely to purchase or take part. But what about the ego benefits? Does that count in the personal analysis of being green? Indeed it does. At least in 1st World Western societies it does.

In societies able to achieve Maslow's highest tier of need, self-actualization, people put significant weight in what products say about them in their decision making process. This is why a Prius carries a premium over and outsells a Civic or a Camry hybrid, because with a Prius people don't have to make the extra effort to search for a badge in order to tell that its a gas electric hybrid. A Prius is instantly recognizable for what it is because of the distinctiveness of the body design. Through its distinctive look it allows the driver to make a statement about him or herself to the general public in a way that an Altima Hybrid just doesn't do.

It’s also good for drivebys, but that's neither here nor there.

Then let's take the look at the "I'm Not a Plastic Bag" phenomenon. What could be a better statement about you and your personal choices than a $15 shoulder bag that says in big bold script that it is not petroleum-based piece of instant trash and sells for over $200 on eBay? "Look at me," it helps its owners say. "I'm so green I'm willing to overpay for a carry-all to be a friend-of-the-earth."

I haven't heard much about it since, but that was because it was a fad. It was overpriced with limited utility. It wasn't like you could fit a week's worth of groceries in it. But hey, at least it was made locally of organic cotton using fair trade practices. Oh wait, no it wasn't.

The "I'm Not a Plastic Bag" is the sort of thing that gives the green movement an air of trendy over trend and invites the criticism of people who don't even think that pollution and global warming is something that we should even worry about much less do anything about.

When companies decide to market a green product and charge a premium for it, it should make an obvious statement about the buyer and their choices. When consumers decide to buy these products or shop at these stores, there should be at least some effort towards due diligence and genuine utility. The seller should make information about the product(s) readily available with proof that they cover the bases of being green. What are the raw materials? How far was it shipped? How will it help me live a greener lifestyle? Was it made using fair trade labor?

We need to be sensible about our marketing and our buying decisions. The burden is not solely on manufacturer, but on consumers as well.

*~*~*~*

This post was written in honor of Blog Action Day in an effort to keep the conversation about the environment and global warming alive.

I submitted a strategic brief to Planning For Good to help Idea Village recruit and retain young professional and entrepreneurial talent in the New Orleans area.

First, the excuses - I think the central strategic idea is sound, but the brief is poorly written. I had done a bunch of research over the two weeks in late August and early September using every article I could find on the internet (I'm so used to finding my research on the internet, the possibility of one day having a research budget sounds like a distant and futile dream). Then work got super busy writing a major Point of View, doing some researching a new business pitch, an important side project that I can't talk about, and working at the PSFK LA conference. By the time the September 21st deadline rolled around, I had a good understanding of the problem but no ideas on how to solve it and no brief. So I felt guilty and gave up.

Then I avoided any news on PFG because I didn't want to feel any worse than I already did from my failure to turn in any work. It wasn't until the 26th, when I read Ed Cotton's blog post that they had extended the deadline to the 28th and that we only had 24 hours to turn it in, that I realized that I still had a chance to alleviate my guilt. I then sat myself down in front of the computer and hammered out a strategic brief in two hours (maybe less). I had to fly to Nashville the next day, so it was either get it done right then or don't do it at all.

The brief is poorly written, for sure. I'm afraid to even look at it again because I did it with such haste, but I think that the idea behind it is sound.

I won't post the whole thing because I'm chicken, but here are the basic points of the brief:

1) Recruiting won't be nearly as much of an issue as retention, because New Orleans is a great place to start out your life (a vibrant art scene and nightlife, a desperate need for talent and new business ideas makes it easy for young bright people to make their marks, and a reasonable cost of living) but an unwelcoming place to stay. How can you expect people to want to settle down, get married, and raise children in a place with a poor school system, corrupt government leaders, a high crime rate, and a lack of quick response to glaring infrastructure issues?

2) Idea Village should start a lobbying arm to influence legal, governmental, and social change in New Orleans. This is because there is only so much change that business and economics can bring to the area. There are a lot of glaring issues that can only be dealt with through good city management and social programs. Make New Orleans a place not only for young idealistic entrepreneurs, but also a place for young idealistic politicians to affect the changes they want to see.

That's it in a nutshell. The brief had a lot more to it, like ten expectations should the strategy be implemented, but they weren't really well thought out and therefore not worth repeating. I'm sure another participant came up with something much better and thoroughly thought out.

Good luck Idea Village and New Orleans, and as for PFG, I expect to be scrambling for solutions to non-profit problems again soon.

I have to give a presentation on Monday covering the basics of interactive trends. Mostly, it will be an introduction to web 2.0 that closes with a few fun videos on how Jonathan Harris is making sense of the mess and Will Wright discussing games vs. toys while showing off Spore. My presentation will be followed by an hour of just fooling around on the web with participants showing the group the sites that they get excited about.

If all goes well, the presentation will be nothing compared to what everyone gets out of the free playtime. This may be unorthodox, but I sincerely believe that the web is something you have to participate in to understand. You can't be a tourist here and expect to be effective or not completely ruin the whole thing because you didn't fully understand what made it special in the first place. I think a lot of poorly strategized and executed interactive campaigns come from tourists and that if planners, marketers, and creatives actually made an effort to be a part of the community then we would see a lot less crap. Why? Because people don't sh*t where they live. I live here. My friends live here. Don't screw up our community by only thinking of how to exploit it. (Rant mode off. Sorry about that.)

Anyways, here are the slides. I used a lot of slides from Lynette Webb because they're so great, and I tried to make my own sides as visually appealing as possible by ignoring templates for once.

1) Imagine a Super Computer made of 6 billion human brains

-- Not literally, that's gross, but on a figurative level that's amazing. Every time you plug into the internet you are tapping into a hard drive of infinite knowledge and opinion. Web 2.0 has made it possible for anyone with internet access to share their expertise, passions, and opinions by blogging, tagging, and commenting. Information is not longer the domain of the exalted experts, by tagging and reinterpreting with blogs, wikis, and social bookmarks jargon has given way to popular semantics. Even the most obscure fragments of knowledge are a few search terms away.

2) What is a wiki?

-- You may only be familiar with Wikipedia and the controversy over its accuracy or inaccuracy, but wikis are so much more. Wikis are places to coordinate information. Take for example the wiki for hacking the iPhone. Every time there was a new finding on unlocking or programming the iPhone, someone put it up, other people edited it for updates and accuracy, and it is all there for anyone to access and use. The group is smarter than the individual when resources can be coordinated.

3) What is RSS?

-- Deep internet users rarely go to web pages anymore. The wait for updates to their RSS feed on their customized homepage or feed reader and read the content from there. RSS also feeds news widgets, like a weather widget or top stories from CNN and the like.

4) What is Social Bookmarking?

-- The most important feature of social bookmarking is tagging. By attaching your own key words to certain sites you label it with how it is significant to you and you share that significance with the rest of the world because now search engines recognize the association between that label and that site.

5) Web Trend Subway Map
-- This is the social web. It is messy, it's rarely ever linear, and its never polar, evenly distributed, or constant. Populations don't just take one route, they take many. Certain countries have preferences for different social sites - the US loves MySpace, the UK adores Bebo, and India thinks that Orkut is the shiznit. The best part is that a year from now, this will completely change. How do you keep your content accessible to the current Social Networking Sites (SNS) and the sites where the conversation will be taking place in the future? Keep your code simple, stupid. Let web standards be your guide.

Who uses social networks? Why are they there?
6) Attitude
-- Gen Yers and younger Xers take the fact that parts of their lives are documented online for granted. That's just life and if you're not sharing then how does anyone know that you're even living? Their parents meanwhile find this to be a severe invasion of privacy. Having your diary entries and your thoughts on the VMAs online is the equivalent of some stranger seeing you naked. That's the difference. Why should a stranger know I'm here vs. why shouldn't everyone know I'm here.

7) Community
-- Today's generation is found questioning traditional community ties more often than not because of the universality of technology. Why should their friends be isolated to the geographic location of where they go to school, or where their parents choose to worship, or where the mall is when their best friend Beth has a friend in Indiana who is really cool and reads the same blogs you do and writes these great posts on her MySpace page. Deeper connections can be formed by like-mindedness over geography.

8) MySpace vs. Facebook
-- MySpace may be bigger than Facebook, but that based more on historical presence than anything else. The real different is in who uses which service. A recent study by Danah Boyd, probably the best known researcher and expert on interactive social networks, summed up the differences in users like this - Facebook is for the kids voted most likely to succeed. They have or will have a college degree, they come from good families, and they're career minded. MySpace is for the outsiders, the art freaks, and the dropouts. A lot of MySpace users see Facebook as The Man (clean cut and organized) and MySpace as the upstart rebel (wacky and wearing all kinds of crazy colors at once).

Another interesting and true way to look at it is through the military. Enlistees use MySpace while officers use Facebook. Access to MySpace was banned on military bases while Facebook is still unrestricted.

9) Profile Pages and Widgets
-- A profile page is the users identity. It is the face they choose to show to their friends and potential friends with their status, their likes and dislikes, their history or where they went to school or where they've worked. Widgets are like the clothes you wear. They facilitate your identity. They say in demonstrative ways - I am a Mac user, these are the countries I've been to, here are the shows I'm looking forward to seeing, here is the music I listen to and you might enjoy it too. When building a widget for a web or profile page, always keep in mind - how does this help the user differentiate their identity?

10) Microblogging
-- Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc. allow users to write missives of about 140 characters that gives all their connections a superficial but good general idea of how they're doing. Why call to catch up when you always know? The contact is constant.

11) Ambient Intimacy
-- It's hard to loose touch with friends when you were never really out of touch in the first place. It's like always having your finger on the pulse of your circle of friends.

12) Branded Utility
-- They make your MySpace page look better. They remind you that it's your turn to clean the coffee pot at the office. They show your friends where they can meet you that night. They show the world who you are and what you're interested in. If you expect people to use something everyday, then you better give them a good reason to do so. Reminders, countdown clocks, and news feeds are a good place to start.

13) Jonathan Harris and We Feel Fine

14) Will Wright and Spore

19) Everything is Miscellaneous

-- Yes, the internet is disorganized. It is a mess, but the semantic web has brought common meaning to what was formerly the property of experts and made it accessible to the common user. A universe of knowledge and people are only a WiFi connection away.

Gareth Kay heads up planning for Modernista in Boston, while Mark Lewis does the same for DDB in San Francisco.

Seven Deadly Sins

- Brands are increasingly homogenous
-- We're not good at doing something completely different
-- We think we are changing, but we are what we do

- We base our thinking on the anomaly of TV
-- Passive, monologue, most $, most share of mind
-- Not like other communication where the best idea = the most share of mind

- What matters is energy
-- Brands with high energy grow faster
-- Salience moves brands forward

- Entropy is the number of states things can be in
-- Randomness creates energy
-- Order and simplicity makes no sense
--- The more random the source of information -> the more entropy -> the more information
- Multiple story lines add energy
-- Coolidge Effect = we are addicted to the new

- John Grant and the Brand Molecule
-- Reality is more ambiguous

- Have a social mission, not just a commercial
-- Proposition, a point of view on the world

- Big changes happen very quickly because of very small causes
-- Chaos theory

- Why are we complicating the input and simplifying the outcomes?
-- Instability makes us uncomfortable
-- Too much time thinking about the big things and not enough time with the small things that make a big impact
-- Go out and try some stuff to see what works

- If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevance even less
-- Embrace uncertainty, stay loose and fluid
-- A continuous active process
-- Planning for uncertainty

Adam Morgan first came to the international business world's attention when he published "Eating the Big Fish" which gave challenger brands strategies for increasing share in markets that have dominant leaders of goliath proportions. Since then he has launched the EatBigFish consultancy and written "The Pirate Inside."

Third Eye

- Challengers don't think of innovations, they think of opportunities
-- Entrepreneurial, everyone, anything, emotional and functional (a way of seeing how to progress business)
- Be always open to opportunity

- 6 Kinds of Insight
-- Reflection (how things are now)
-- Opportunity (how things could be)
--- Consumer - zooming in on a small target
--- Category promise
--- We are all disabled by modern living - future of convenience market
--- Opportunities in the smaller markets
--- Kissing the shadow - embracing your negatives
-- Foundation
-- Success
-- Product
-- Staff and Culture

- Blindness to Opportunities
-- Selective attention - focusing on one thing and missing the obvious
-- Functional fixatedness
-- Bounded awareness
-- Environmental distortion

- Create a culture of desire around opportunities
-- Barclays trying out new ideas only in their Guilford branch
--- The scarcity of the service creates demand in the market

- Be "always on"
-- Mindset
-- Everyday
-- Have an open door policy
-- Incentivizing a continual feed of ideas

I went. I saw. I didn't party like a rock star and I still caught a cold. So unfair.

I met so many great people - Jason, Gareth, Mark, Chad, a bunch of folks from TBWA New York, a couple planners from Modernista, and a lot of random people whom I would recognize if I saw them but whose names escape me at the moment. Everyone was super nice. I still felt like a bit of an outsider sometimes, but meeting someone new and interesting usually interrupted those feelings.

I did manage to tell one girl that she absolutely had to leave her job immediately. She was a junior level planner at a small Midwestern agency that only had room for one strategist, her. What else could I tell her? Stay and ruin her career prospects?

Most of the programming was good. I've only read one scathing review so far, otherwise all of the comments and reviews have been positive. Most of the content was just about doing more and being more actionable instead of just tossing about theories. It was very positive outlook overall.

There were a few sales pitches. Google, Time Warner, Facebook had a lot of great things to say by involving a lot of insight and vision of how we can work together in the whole "give us your money" message. Yahoo clearly didn't get it. Their VP of Sales was so old school I would't have been surprised if he had sat down in his easy chair with a martini in hand and told us how the world worked back in the good old days. Then there was an IMAX film maker who had absolutely no business being there at all. Half the room walked out before he even started showing any of his films.

On the upside, most of the other speakers, Eric Ryan of Method, Bruce Mau, Sir Ken Robinson, Mark Earls, Mark Lewis, Gareth Kay, and Adam Morgan were great. They were all very inspiring but well grounded.

Some of the higher level planners were so inspired by what they were hearing that they started a Facebook group for planners with the ambition of helping non-profits solve their communications problems. Less talk, more doing, better karma. We haven't chosen a project yet, but we're looking and if anyone has any idea, we would love to hear them.

We're really good at thinking, now its time to get better at doing.

This Sunday is actually a pretty big day for me. First I will be celebrating my birthday with friends over a dim sum brunch in Chinatown. Then I will be catching the train from Union Station to San Diego to attend my first planning conference. Three days of research and brand strategy goodness. Oh, and there will be some drinking. Many bar visits are expected and bonding over booze I can only assume will be the norm. Which should be fun considering that I am, if anything, known for holding my liquor and being gracious while inebriated.

On second thought, maybe I should hold off on the alcohol.

There has been much planning conference bashing going around the interwebs, and I have to admit that the cynicism has made me less excited about the day programs, but it has yet to squelch my interest in meeting other planners. Especially those planners who's blogs I read and whom I've met virtually.

FYI - Facebook has been a godsend for networking with other account planners. I would have never thought that the Plannersphere group would ever get to 580 strong and climbing.

So there you have it. Cynicism blended with anticipation. It's just a hunch, but I foresee a lot of panel ditching in favor of a quick dip in the pool.

Exercise is usually portrayed in a very heroic and humorless sort of way. Be in the "zone." Beat someone. Beat something. Beat yourself. Oooh! Awesome! Endorphins! Look at all the pretty colors...

Funny. This isn't how I feel about exercise. This isn't how a lot of people I know feel about exercise. Exercise is a necessary evil. I would much rather be using the time and money I spend at the gym doing far more productive things, like blogging, cooking a halfway decent dinner for myself, cleaning my apartment, buying plane tickets to see ZM, going out for drinks and live music with friends, sleeping, or being ordered around by my mom.

But I was surprised and impressed by this little number by Weiden+Kennedy Amsterdam. This is an attitude I can completely identify with, and it makes me laugh.

I am not an athlete. I use an exercise bike because it has a "Calories Burned" counter and I don't really care if its not very accurate. I do pilates for an hour every week because I don't want to have to hold up my arms and suck in my gut just so I can look pretty good in that bikini I just bought. I do squats, lunges, push-ups, and run up and down stairs so that when I meet with a personal trainer once a month I don't feel crippled for the following week. And finally, I pay $50 a month in gym membership fees so that I can fit into my clothes. Especially the vintage. I am not getting rid of the vintage.

Exercising sucks, but you know what sucks more? Moving up a dress size and an overhang. That really sucks.

It's that time again. Time for coffee, time for delicious pastries, time for interesting conversations with intelligent strangers, and time for YOU to join the fun.

We're been on a good attendance roll, so please come to Susina on Friday May 18th at 8am. I won't be there (I'm traveling on business), but Jamie and Jay will.

Susina Bakery
7122 Beverly Blvd.
Los Angeles, CA

LikeMind.us

Upcoming.org

What: Likemind Coffee Morning LA

Where: Susina Bakery, 7122 Beverly Blvd., Los Angeles, CA

When: April 20th at 8am

Why: Because having coffee with likeminded people is fun! (Seriously, if you have an interest in pop culture and stimulating conversation and are not allergic to waking up early in the morning then come join us. We would love to have you.)

The last two LikeMinds have been sponsored by Anomaly, meaning free coffee and swag, and this one may be sponsored as well. We're not sure, but there's only one way to find out :)

See you there.

Upcoming.org

Heather LeFevre, a planner in Richmond, VA, is doing an international survey of Account/Strategic Planners for which I am greatful. Planning is a mysterious and youthful profession which even planners sometimes know little about and having a survey of experience and working conditions for planners everywhere will be of great use to both employers and planners everywhere.

Besides, have you ever tried to find average salary info for planning jobs? It's almost impossible. In the past I've had to infer by taking the results from simiar professions and averaging the results. Quick and dirty, but not particularly effective in salary negotiations.

So, take the planner survey so that we can collectively become more powerful, more satisfied, and better compensated.

My favorite question was whether or not I have a foriegn accent. (explanation for non-ad people: planners are famous for being from another country. Specifically Great Britain. American clients seem to pay better attention to people who have a British accent and I even had a boss once who toyed with the idea of using a British accent with some of his clients to see if they took him more seriously.)

Part 1

Analytical Design Principles
- Turning fundamental cognitive tasks into design principles and practices to assist thinking about the information
1) Compare data, show comparisons
2) Show mechanism, causality, dynamics
-- Casual thinking is unnecessary
3) Show more than one or two variables
4) Completely integrate words, numbers, and graphics (it's cell data)
-- Tell the entire story with the graphic
-- No bureaucracy of information
-- Design should explain content
5) Document everything and tell people about it
-- Establish credibility
6) Design is an agency to content
-- Serious presentations stand or fall depending on the quality of the content (relevance, integrity)
-- Boring numbers -> get better numbers, do NOT over-design
7) Try to show information as long as possible adjacent in space
-- Not stacked in time (flip, flip, flip)
-- No such thing as too much information for the human eye
-- Start with the hardware and what the user sees and then think about software.
-- Begin with content.
-- "Visible certainty liberates us from wordy arguments." ~ Galileo

8) Use small multiples
-- A small canvas on which to paint the information
-- A steady field to show content variation
-- Mastery of detail generates credibility
9) Take graphics and tables as seriously as we take our words on the universal grid
-- Put everything in context
-- Detail brings context, not clutter
-- To clarify, add detail. It shows relation.

The single biggest threat to learning the truth from a presentation is "cherry picking" data.

Lumpy graphics are better than spiky graphics
- You can see patterns in the data better

Remember the Yuppie? Remember how Michael J. Fox made us laugh at his uptight Type-A character, Alex P. Keaton? The ego. The one-upsmanship. The conformity. The hyperactive drive for materialistic wealth. Lest we forget American Psycho, with a lot of same qualities taken to much darker and bizarre extremes. Is that a titanium business card I see?

Remember your classmates in the 80's with dreams of becoming stockbrokers, doctors, or lawyers? They had no ambition of changing the world or making a difference. They just wanted the German sports car that came with the hefty paycheck. They were the perfect products of insatiable affluence.

Of course you remember. Just like you remember hot pink legwarmers and Flock of Seagulls hair, all of which died out with the decade that spawned them only to be resurected for the sake of nostalgia. Right? Maybe not.

From Details Magazine:

Of course, that term, yuppie, has fallen so out of favor that we’re not even supposed to use it anymore. We’re expected to come up with a neologism—a clever 21st-century inversion of the word. But we’re not going to do that, because we don’t need to: The yuppie of 1986 and the yuppie of 2006 are so similar as to be indistinguishable. A used copy of The Yuppie Handbook recently fell into my hands. The book was published in 1984 as a jokey piece of social anthropology, and it made a slew of observations about this new American species. The yuppie’s bizarre lifestyle preferences were intended to elicit populist guffaws. Here are some of the things, according to The Yuppie Handbook, that the budding yupster could not live without: gourmet coffee, a Burberry trench coat, expensive running shoes, a Cuisinart, a renovated kitchen with a double sink, smoked mozzarella from Dean & DeLuca, a housekeeper, a mortgage, a Coach bag, a Gucci briefcase, and a Rolex. Oh, har har har, that crazy yup!

The yuppie could be found working off stress with a shiatsu massage and a facial, learning as much as possible about fine wine, traveling around the world on vacation, exercising at a fancy health club, listening to Bessie Smith and Bob Marley and the Police on a tiny device attached to headphones, drinking bottled spring water, freshening up in a five-star-hotel-quality bathroom, typing away at a computer while sitting in an ergonomic chair, racking up gobs of debt on his credit card, and—the clincher—eating tuna sashimi for lunch! The mere mention of tuna sashimi for lunch was apparently seen as the height of hilarity back in 1984. “A yuppie most nearly approaches sainthood,” the book noted, “when he or she is able to accomplish more things in a single day than is humanly possible.” (This was long before BlackBerries.)

Okay, maybe I don't do all of those things, but I would say that almost everyone I know is guilty of at least one of these things. We have essentially become our own worst nightmares in a hipster package.

“When people were denouncing yuppies, they had considerably lower incomes than yuppies, so the things yuppies spent their money on seemed frivolous and unnecessary from their vantage point,” says Cornell University economist Robert H. Frank, author of Luxury Fever. “What most people fail to anticipate is that your sense of what you need and want is very elastic. When your income rises, your consumption standard gradually adapts.”

We may have hated them then, but we can practically identify with them now, with two exceptions - we are far more self aware and globally conscious. It is no longer fashionable to simply consume for the sake of it. We don't just shop at Ralph's Fresh Fare, we spend the extra money and buy our groceries at Whole Foods because the meat is humanely raised without hormones and the produce is (mostly) organic. To show off one's wealth with a Porsche or a finely tailored suit for daily life is gauche. Instead we fill our closets with limited edition sweatshop free t-shirts and designer jeans. Its like a secret code for those with the appropriate level of affluence. If you can recognize it, then you must be in the club. The Yuppie Club.

Am I ashamed of being a Yuppie Club member? A little. But I also know that this level of affluence can do a lot of good. I can give to charity. I can buy better designed, more sustainable, and less disposable products. I can be a yuppie with a heart.

[via PSFK]

Our parents lived in a simple world and the advertising reflected this. They listened or watched their favorite entertainment programs and gave their attention to the program's sponsor in return. Those were the days. A clear exchange of value.

In the years that passed, the broadcast landscape became much more complex and consumers were given tools to avoid the increased amounts of commercials inserted into their favorite programs - remote controls, cable channels, radio scanning buttons, DVRs - and they used these devices with great glee. Who could blame them? The exchange of value had stopped flowing in their favor and they knew it.

As attention and media channels become more fragmented, consumer attention becomes harder to get and therefore more valuable. The old tricks just aren't cutting it anymore. People are too aware of what their time is worth and a crappy sitcom in exchange for crappy 30 second commercial is the equivalent of 'giving the milk away for free.' That trade holds no value for either party, especially when one party is all too capable of changing the channel until the commercial break is over, recording it and fast forwarding through the unwanted content, or even doing a little covert downloading. That is the reality of advertising in a world of media savvy consumers.

Advertisers are beginning to find better ways to get our attention. The buzzword is engagement, which is a fairly nebulous term. I prefer to think of it in simpler terms - a return to a true exchange of value. Consumers are more apt to listen to and welcome your message when you give them something of equal value in exchange. Something funny, something useful, something beautiful, something that increases their knowledge in meaningful ways, something targeted to a person who will find the message and method of delivery to be of personal significance.

Jones Soda is an example of a beverage company that is giving social networking communities something they find worthy of their attention and possibly even the holy grail of social marketing - public allegiance. Jones is giving MySpace users the gift of well-designed customizable pages. In an online galaxy filled with fugly user profiles what could be more useful than the ability to stand out through good HTML/CSS? It's that kind of thinking that sets a brand up for success in a world of finicky and fickle consumers.

I'm always cautious when a brand wants to enter a new medium. I sometimes wonder if they actually think that the fact that they are there and that they are first is somehow enough to make the venture successful. Brands would likely increase their chances for success in a new advertising venture if they took a hard look at the exchange of value between brand and consumer during that potential interaction and evaluated the balance of trade.

[Inspired by Wired News: Big Biz Buddies Up to Gen Y and an ongoing debate with my boss]

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