• by Jack Feuer , September 8, 2009

One of the creepier benefits of digital technology is that you can actually watch the future consume the past. It happened to me this weekend.

I recently watched a clip of that new "Art & Copy" documentary on advertising starring a bunch of old creatives sitting around talking about how brilliant they are and how major the influence of what they do -- or more accurately, did -- is on society.

At almost the same exact moment, my son, as he often does, provided a merciless example of how wrong they are about that.

You have to admire these coots. They're as arrogant and as narcissistic now as they've ever been and trust me, nobody does smug like a big-agency creative director does smug. It's almost touching that they're still acting like princes of the city, even as they sink like stones into a sea of irrelevance. The industry they ruled like satraps is reduced to a smoking ruin by sneering infants armed with digital death rays.

See, I watched these ancient messagers drone on about the glory of advertising on Labor Day, when my son celebrated his 21st birthday. The first thing he did was drop MySpace and get on Facebook. The next thing he did was drag me and his skinny girlfriend to the Cheesecake Factory, where he ordered a peach Bellini and some nightmarish chocolate and rum thing for breakfast and gleefully demanded to be carded.

When I asked him why he hit the social nets first, he explained that the switch is a digital-age rite of passage. MySpace is for kids. Facebook is for young adults. All his slightly older friends wrote on his wall and congratulated the young man for "joining the team" and leaving the social network of their childhood behind.

I imagine the next step is Twitter. Once he's learned how to be an elitist twit.

Anyway, when I was 21, getting drunk was job one, closely followed by getting laid. Now when you reach the milestone, you have to change your social-network allegiance first.

The old white ad guys don't know crap about this stuff. Neither do the agencies they run or used to run. They don't ever come close to reaching my son or any other 20something, and couldn't unless they invade their social-network space -- where marketers are even more unwelcome than you think they are.

But all we hear is a lot of foolishness about how old people are using social networks and all we see are an apparently endless supply of god-awful commercials about how the geezers are taking over the Internet.

You know what's even scarier? The young, hooked-up, cloud-surfing, tweeting, digital shops are as clueless as the ones run by the old white ad guys. You'd think the digitards would know stuff, like the new watershed moment is when you trade up to Facebook.

But I can't be bothered with advertising's shortcomings anymore. I have to log onto Facebook and post baby pictures of my kid on his wall.