• by Jack Feuer , June 27, 2007

My cat thinks she's a goat. You name it, she eats it -- usually washed down with a delightful toilet-bowl water digestif.

Plastic bags. Wire. Plants. Couch. Carpet. The hard copy of the Los Angeles Timescomprehensive coverage of Paris Hilton walking out of jail on her chicken legs with that dumbass grin. I foolishly left it on top of the dining room table. Down the feline gullet.

But my cat is not a goat. Sooner or later, she'll pay for that delusion.

At least my pet has an excuse: she's non-sentient. The same cannot be said for the media business, all sides of it, which is gorging on delusion this week.

Ad Age's Scott Donaton complained that none of the big agency leaders on the Cannes panel he moderated said anything new, or even noteworthy. Donaton griped about their lack of candor and cavalier dismissal of all that ails the ad business.

There's something seriously funny about the architect of Brand Scott -- the foundations of which were built on smugness -- complaining about the same characteristic in Jeff Goodby and Andrew Robertson. Still, he's right.

Big agencies are getting bitch-slapped daily by smarter, hungrier and hipper digital boutiques, media shops and, ahem, "consultants." Yet, they're smug. And boy are they paying for it.

Meanwhile, the Bancrofts are perilously close to selling The Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch, who swears on the heads of his children and the syndicated rights to "When Animals Attack!" that he won't screw with the paper. It looks like he's going to convince them. And by God, are they going to pay for that.

News Corp., by the way, refused to cooperate with The New York Times' investigative series on the Murdoch media empire, charging, "it would be reckless of us to participate in their malicious assault." That's even more seriously funny than Donaton vs. Goodby, et al.

Look, if we can't figure any of this stuff out, can we at least be honest about it? For my cat, the price of delusion is an upset stomach. For the captains of communications, the consequences will be far, far greater.

Voltaire (who, by the sound of his name, probably works for Publicis) said, "God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." That's as succinct a summation of the state of the media marketplace today that I've ever heard.

OK, in the interest of full disclosure, I did a search for Voltaire on the Ad Age and Adweek Web sites, and I didn't get a single hit. So really, how much can he know?

Still, I think he's onto something.