• by Jack Feuer , March 12, 2008

I know what you want, my little piranhas. You want me to carve up the news that Adweek's editor is about to be promoted out of the office from whence she has dispatched rough injustice for a decade. You want me to tout the numbers that show Adweek's redesign didn't even make the needle tremble. I guess Nielsen will have to give back all those Slingboxes they handed out at the launch party.

OK, I just did. Now can we please get down to business? Because we have issues, people.

You wouldn't know it if you were at the 4As Media Conference in Orlando, though. Instead, you'd have heard a 30-minute commercial for Disney masquerading as a presentation. A Google fox swearing that he just came to the henhouse to make friends. A panel on the future that offered such gems as the upfront is going away and content comes before channel (this from Crispin, of course).

So much mind-numbing nonsense, so little time. Then I got home. And it got worse.

First thing I read is an email from a colleague alerting me to a story about Doritos--which, with its user-generated junk, has become to advertising what Joe Francis is to sexual equality, encouraging yet another short-bus rider to make a 30-second spot. Only this classic will be beamed at what Science Daily calls "a solar system 42 light years away that is thought to have a zone that could support life as we know it."

Not after that commercial gets there, it won't.

Folks, stop with the stupid ad tricks already. You need to get serious about some tough topics.

Like Irwin Gotlieb's idea to import the European model of buying rebates to the U.S.--although BusinessWeek, typically, more or less called him a crook for suggesting it. How dare a leader act like a leader and look for new revenue streams, right? Hey, it's only his agencies' survival that's at stake.

Or the contretemps between SMG and Donovan Data Systems, ignited when the former had the temerity to suggest that Donovan deliver what it promised. Did we get serious discussion about how vendors can't keep up with the demands of the new marketplace? Or why Donovan, like Nielsen, has so much power when it is so clearly unable to satisfy its customers?

Was there even a whiff of talk about whether Naked and its ilk presage the arrival of a new kind of media agency for a new kind of media marketplace?

Hell, no. We were all too busy trying to finagle invites to the dinner at Martha Stewart's house.

Mark Twain said "you can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus." That's an insight that was lost on the 1,600 people who schlepped down to the plastic wasteland of Central Florida last week.

Now, you'll have to excuse me. I need to write a letter of condolence to whichever poor doomed bastard accepts the soon-to-be vacant editor job at Adweek.

Editor's Note: Before editing UCLA's alumni magazine and penning "Media X" for MediaPost, Jack Feuer was national news editor of Adweeek.