• by Jack Feuer , April 15, 2009

Why am I seeing a John Deere commercial on "The Rachel Maddow Show?" That's like hiring the Ku Klux Klan to cater a Quinceañera.

Pressing questions like these have preoccupied me this week. Maybe as the weather warms, the surf swells and skirts rise -- and I'm doing a little subconscious spring cleaning. Making room for new thoughts. Sweeping out the litter of last year's media and marketing stories and stacking up boxes of gray matter in anticipation of another action-packed upfront.

It's a big job. You cannot imagine how much crap is stored up there. Or maybe you can. In any case, I'm even less inclined to suffer the antics of Ad Nation than ever before.

Which brings me to TiVo, the technological manifestation of marketing nonsense. One big reason I need to clear my head is my friend Kathy's close encounter with TiVo. It demonstrates, once again, why you people need to start paying attention.

Kathy canceled TiVo in November. Didn't need it, they were moving. They got emails from TiVo ,but ignored them--they'd closed their account. Then they got a notice: You owe us $12.99, and we're going into collection to get it. So there.

Kathy fought with them on the phone for hours. They insisted. Kathy threatened. They kept insisting. Kathy made good on her threat.

She dragged their ass to Twitter.

Pow! Situation resolved. Kathy didn't have to pay her 13 bucks, and TiVo spared itself a generous helping of furious shit. (You really need to know Kathy to understand that last line.)

So what have we learned, kids? The same damn lesson you never learn. Being a lemming and confusing a customer-service tool with a communications channel, like the rest of your peers insist on doing, is not good business.

It can be a creative hook, however. Tweeting is a copy point in a new spot pimping smart phones--along with the de rigueur "some of you may not know what we're talking about" line directed at older viewers. Which kind of makes the whole spot moot, I think, but that's where impatience comes back into the conversation.

A soul sister to the tweet spot is a new Saturn campaign which twists itself into an agonizing pretzel of artifice for a brand on the chopping block.

One spot has this earnest Saturn sales guy talking about how the line is still strong. No, it isn't. It's eating its last meal and watching the gallows rise in the courtyard outside its prison cell.

Another sneers at Hyundai's brilliant Assurance campaign and offers up instead a Saturn-come-very-lately offer to pay a few months of car payments if buyers lose their jobs.

How magnanimous. I'm sure Rick Wagoner can use the help.

Ad Nation, please quit screwing around.

Don't be dishonest about being honest in your creative and give us cynical pap about your almost extinct brand or misguided attempts to be fresh.

Don't be lazy in your activations and force us to endure freakish buys like a tractor ad on an uber-urban talk show hosted by a lesbian Rhodes Scholar.

Otherwise, I'm sending Kathy after you.

Trust me, you don't want that.