• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, October 10, 2008

I was reading my latest brokerage statement and feeling pretty sorry for myself (and wondering if I could steer my 17-year-old away from private college toward a big state university) when I read this tidbit from census data: the current median household income in the wealthiest nation on earth is about $50,233.

Don't know about you, but if I made $50,233 a year, I'd consider myself destitute and would give serious consideration to trying to collect the Nigerian oil money that still seems to be kicking around (although it seems to have moved to the UK and into some guy's forgotten estate.) I appreciate that median is not the same as average and that about 9% of U.S. households clock in with a net worth of over $1 million (and if you want to be picky, they have an average net worth, excluding primary residence, of nearly $2.2 million), but nevertheless it gives one pause to think that a great many people make $50,233 or less in a year.

Meanwhile, the recession is about to breach the levees and help wash away a fair amount of the savings most of us have accumulated in the last great run-up (kudos if you went to cash in January). Many more of us will be out of work. Look to your left, look to your right. A couple of you guys won't be in business a year from now. Let's hope it is the other two. That house that was appraised for over a million bucks when you got a home equity loan to buy the SUV ain't gonna sell for anywhere near that amount (if you can even find a buyer with a mortgage). I could keep going, but you've read your own financial statements.

Meanwhile, here we are as an industry trying to figure out more efficient, more effective ways to separate people from their money. How can we tweak our SEM to pull in one more buyer at a slightly lower cost? Can I get a higher spot rate if I move the show to Wednesday at 10 p.m.? How can we package together inventory to get the effective CPM to $2? What are the precise algorithms that we can apply to move response rates from .002 to .001? What if I move the pod 30 seconds sooner in the hour than the other networks? Will the blonde work better than the redhead? If I lower the offer, will more people take it? Should I protect the integrity of my media brand by rejecting low-CPM direct-response traffic? If I can't fill the ad pages, should I break them into smaller units and take those "lose-10-pounds-in-a-week" ads? Help me--I have to spend the rest of the budget in the next two weeks or lose it for next year! Ad Age: Bad Times Can Be Good (for smaller agencies). It's not about PII, it's about anonymous profiles.

Were the average Joe Six-pack (that beloved friend of Sarah Palin's) to listen in on some of the conversations we have in this business, they would be stunned at the alchemy we attempt to connect his eyeballs to our client's messages. The hairs we split over creative executions, choice of medium, selection of ad unit, method of targeting, frequency, reporting, and optimization would make the hairs on the back of his neck stand at attention.

Not that what we do is any more amoral or bizarre than inventing derivatives of derivatives like swaps, forward rate agreements, and exotic options or trashing a century's worth of statistics in favor of new analytics such as "on base percentage" and "slugging percentage" to produce a better baseball team for less money. The road to excellence is often paved with miniscule improvements over our own latest version--or the other guy's.

But occasionally you have to come up for air and realize that it's all about not squeezing the Charmin.