Media X: Mad in the U.S.A.

by Jack Feuer, Jul 30, 2008, 8:01 AM

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I used to have plenty of athletic socks and boxers, but they must have been offended when my kid broke up with the skinny girlfriend, quit his job and moved in with me two months ago. Almost immediately, every sock and all my underwear disappeared.

Meanwhile, my wayward youth is wearing socks and shorts that look suspiciously familiar.

But now the skinny G is back, the boy has a new job in a head shop (I couldn't be prouder) and that means, God willing, he will soon move back in with her and her mother in Sherman Oaks. Then I should get my underwear back, including the pair that has the Corona logo and beer bottle and a picture of a palm tree on it. (Some advertising is just too good to resist.)

So I'm feeling pretty happy today -- and it's a really odd feeling. Because I'm almost always angry these days. So is everybody else I know. In fact, judging from the tone and tenor of discourse on big-league media like the blogosphere and the social networks, and even second-tier media channels like the TV networks, this is one royally pissed off nation.

Curiously, it was my son who provided a clue as to where all this seething was seeded. That happened during a recent conversation on why the 10 pairs of white tube socks I bought for myself at Pants Town appear to have walked out of my sock drawer and rearranged themselves like hive creatures into a dirty-gray, smelly, sticky, round ball that squats in the corner of my son's bedroom.

I asked him what he and his fellow Millennials really think about marketing and politics and pop culture. He answered with one word: "rage."

See, Generation X always complains that they got the short stick on everything. (The late, great doyenne of product marketing, FCB's Laurel Cutler, once said that for Gen Xers, "even the weather sucks.") But the nasty little whiners are now in their 30s and 40, and they're not doing all that bad. Really, it's Gen Y that's going to bear the brunt of the damage their forebears have wrought on this country.

It's the Millennials who will have to clean up the garbage -- literally. And probably wear gas masks, too. So the decisions they make-political, behavioral, philosophical, you name it -- are fueled by anger.

This is a root cause of why they hate marketing. Not because they're anti-consumerism. Hell, they're the ur-consumers. No, they hate marketing because they want truth from you, and all you give them is bullshit. Murketing and that crap.

These are angry consumers, folks. Why don't you ever treat them that way? Your messages -- and it doesn't matter if they're delivered on "The Colbert Report," in a tweet or in a tent at Lollapalooza -- will have impact or, believe it or not, influence over all 55 million of the digitally addicted little devils.

Rage marketing. Angry advertising. Now that's a winning play.

But I gotta go. The kid and the skinny girlfriend are at the movies, which means I have two hours to turn this place upside down until I find my beer briefs.

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