• by Jack Feuer , June 11, 2008

I'm writing this on Sunday morning, filing early before heading down to San Diego for four days of R&R, but I'm having trouble concentrating because of all the sex. I'm not having any, you understand. When you reach my age and waist size, the only thing that excites you is chocolate cake. No, I'm talking about the Los Angeles Times Web site, where I'm reading about all the alleged drug-fueled sex that indicted tech billionaire Henry Nicholas had with high-priced hookers in his underground love bunker in Orange County. Oh, and alleged stock fraud, too.

Is this a golden state, or what?

But the mogul's alleged indiscretions are so much fun to read about that they keep drawing my focus away from writing the column. Which is annoying because I really need to finish this so I can hit the 405 before tens of thousands of our less-than-legal neighbors pile four generations of their family into 15-year-old compacts and head down to Disneyland, clogging up the freeway and turning a three-hour drive into a six-hour automotive root canal.

And I really need to get down to Mission Bay and get beached on beer and daydreams about when I used to have sex, because there's plenty to celebrate. A new era of marketing appears to be dawning, and it begins -- my fingers shake with joy as I type this -- with the imminent death of the Hummer.

See, sharing space with billionaire sex on the Times site is the news that General Motors is bowing to the inevitable and plunging sales and "considering" killing the obscene machine. The demise of this monstrosity is a herald, I believe, of a new era in American life, an early sign of a new, downsized consumer culture in which less will be more -- and more will be bad form.

This is the marketplace you will be talking to for the foreseeable future, because it ain't gettin' any better, boys and girls, no matter which Senator wins the White House.

I'm not talking about eco-pandering. Marketers have gotten quite good at that. I'm talking about a sea-change in how people think, and consequently what they buy, and what brands they embrace.

It will be lovely to see all the strutting and chest-thumping we've been forced to consume in the past decade die the undignified and humiliating death it deserves. No more celebrations of big. No more media plans and creative executions based on bling. No more messages delivered with an outsized "urban," i.e. outlandishly egotistical, style.

Get ready for advertising odes to bus riding. Crispin campaigns featuring smart-ass burger lovers on scooters. And new media agency job titles like "alternative fuel lifestyle evangelist."

And no more damn Hummer commercials.

I'd like to see more forward thinking from media shops on this -- you are supposed to be the experts on behavior and societal change, after all. I haven't yet, but the change has just begun .and you're all preoccupied with worrying about what you're going to do after Google disintermediates your ass.

In the meantime, I'll be down in Diego, pounding Coronas, waiting for a small new day to dawn and trying to figure out how to get a press pass to Henry Nicholas' trial.