• by Jack Feuer , September 1, 2009

Yesterday an international team of scientists found that every human being on the planet is a mutant. This, finally, explains Morty Binn.

See, a couple lifetimes ago, I was a young PR guy, and my manager at the agency searched for an account I could handle without breaking anything. He settled on a client named Morty Binn, who ran the biggest barter firm in the country.

Morty was about three-and-a-half feet tall and dressed and acted like John Gotti. He'd swap anything for anything; he had crap scattered all over his offices, like a suit of armor, stuff that beeped, and, of course, mountains of airline upgrades and hotel rooms.

Definitely a mutant, but I loved the guy. It was fun watching marketers line up outside Binn's boardroom to make sub-rosa barter deals, which made them look like heroes to their bosses. Alas, I didn't watch for long.

I was manning reception for a big Binn party at a horse ranch. A Kennedy came up and announced herself. Smart ass that I was, I made a big show out of searching for her on the guest list and then asked her to spell her last name. The Kennedy made a little moue of disapproval. Morty was considerably more animated. I was quickly fired from the agency for that and other asinine behavior.

Nevertheless, I still harbor a fondness for the oldest form of mutant business transaction. It may be déclassé and a little shady, but ironically, I find barter to be the most honest kind of media buy.

And it never goes away. Every major media agency has a barter unit hidden away, like the homicidal sibling hillbilly families keep chained up in the cellar. And every time the economy heads south, the media agencies trot out their deformed kin to show how responsive they are to clients' need to get something for nothing.

In fact, the economy has fallen into a sewer more times than I care to remember since I kidded a Kennedy at Morty Binn's bash. And like clockwork, a barter story surfaces in the trade press with every downturn. (More than once, it has been written by me so I could avoid actual reporting.)

The story never changes in either style or substance. It always says that hard times have brought corporate swapping new respectability, and that the media agencies' mutant barter divisions are going great guns.

And here's the beauty part: Every time, without fail, this story appears just as the economy turns around. Barter then sinks back into the shadows, muttering to itself and dragging its clawed fingernails across the cellar floor.

So imagine my delight when I logged on to Ad Age this week and found the barter story, triumphantly risen once again from the depths. This is the sign we've been waiting for. Brothers and sisters, happy days must soon be here again.

Go ahead and hoist one for me. I'd celebrate with you, except my nephew is getting married at the end of the month, and I have to find somebody willing to barter a used cat for a round-trip ticket to South Bend, Indiana.