Baby Boomer's ain't buying your merchandise!

Thursday, November 15, 2007
Madison avenue wants to sell Boomer's with nostalgia…

I don’t know about you, but USA capitalist culture is getting on my last nerve. Free market fetishist look upon comicality as a religious sacrament. Money is their God and I get up my atheist resentment. Their pie in the sky is on sale this week. Holy shitworth! I was at some urinal in some public restroom and a miniature billboard was selling me some perfume to get the babe hot at my eye level! I can’t even pee in private anymore without somebody trying to sell you something. Thank God I ain't in Cuba! They don’t have commercials there! Those Godless beasts!
Now that the baby boomer's are in their golden years, which will be a giant demographic, Madison avenue wants a piece of that action. So how are they going to sell their products to us? Play the hippie card. Play old top 40 songs to sell us car insurance with goofy psychedelic graphics, and for the ladies? Appeal to their feminist sensibilities by making fun of white European males.
One problem with using the hippie card! Not all the boomer's were hippies! The ones who were, was an over-exposed minority who got the medias attention. Sorry, Dick Cheney never made it to Woodstock. Oh, yes, Boomer's loved the rock and roll on their parent’s car radio but they were not your stereotypical rebels WITH a cause. Most were uncool un hip nerds, well…. not all. Just look at a schoolbook of a white class high school from 1969. Most of the kids looked like the cast of, “My 3 sons”. (For those of another generation, My 3 sons was a TV show) They had pimples with nice haircuts and the Girls all looked like Lesley Gore with acne. (Lesley was a pop singer back then) Nope! You ad-persons better find another angle to sell us. You think British Petroleum is not going to tickle my ecological sentiments by convincing us they really give a rat’s ass about the environment? Don’t patronize us airhead consumers. Back then, there were different people with different cultural tastes. How about teenage red necks of that era? Are you going sell them trucks by playing Merle Haggard tunes? Oh you forgot about the Black nationalists? Are you going to sell I-Pods by playing The Last Poets in the background? Naw…you are going to kiss up to the whites of that era with Donovan songs. Jesus’! What ever happened to that guy?
Here is a little biographical yarn….
It’s all too clear to me; I can visualize it in high definition. It was warm day in Los Angeles California. It was in the autumn of 1969 and anti-war student activism hit the high school level. Our small SDS chapter organized a student strike to protest against the Vietnam War. Without going to detail, we marched in front of the schools administration building. On the sidewalk, we march up and down the street with our homemade signs and banner. What we did was legal, with the exception of the issue of truancy. A police squad car with 2 cops sat in their vehicle observing us, the boys vice principal stared from a 2nd story window. The school administration didn’t want an incident, so they let us protest. Then came lunch period. We were 300 strong within a student body of 9000. We thought the rest of the student body would swarm to our picket lines to help shut down the school, didn’t happened. . The students just gawked at us like we were rodeo clowns. They stood slacked jawed and in a state of lethargy. We chanted: Join us! Join us! They stood there like they waiting to catch a bus. The only incident that happened was when a group of the football team, who were laughing at us and decided to get juvenile. One of the jocks ran to our picket line and snatched our banner. He rip it up and crumbled it up then threw it in the trashcan. His team cheered him like he made a touchdown. They chanted, Death to the Viet Cong! Better dead than Red! Some members of the ROTC shook the hand of the banner snatcher. The boys vice principal told them to leave the area.
Then the lunch bell rang and like lemmings, the students went to their classes. There we were, all by our selves. Some cars honked to support us but that was it. 3 hours later we dispersed. The next day, I was in history class and I asked a classmate who sported a peace button on his shirt why he didn’t join us in the student strike. He told me that he couldn't’t miss a day of class or his grade average would suffer. He wanted to attend an Ivy League College. My follow question was: So you never had a sick day? He didn’t answer. While I would read books by Abbie Hoffman, he read college brochures.
So what is my point? Most baby boomer's were not wild eye radicals. People in advertising should do better research before trying to get their money for products made in China.
One more point, most of us disliked commercialism, and materialism, what makes you think most of us are going to buy your material goods? Oh, you think we all sold out? Maybe? I keep my memories to myself and once in a while I would share them with my friends. A great majority of these people in the creative department of these advertising agencies weren’t even born in the 60’s. So what do they know? I guess the owner of that agency was one of those students who were watching us that day. So Madison Avenue, take your nostalgic appeal and roll it up and smoke it.
One more thing! No more Beatle shit! If I never hear about the Beatles again would be fine with me. Unless it’s about the MC5, then you might nail me.

Cool video!
http://www.neilyoung.com/lwwtoday/videolinks/videolink_354.html

thank you

with small post-counts wading in today, and with quality stuff. Long may it last.

oh no must be the season of the witch..yeah must be the season of the witch." Donavon.."Season of the Witch" 1966
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUBHvOJCSto&feature=related

We have these insipid commercials from the old aging Easy Rider himself, Dennis Hopper, telling us that we don't "turn our dreams over to the authorities" when we reach early stage old age, and telling us that "our dreams changed everything" with hippie-rock as the background music. These are bullshit to the n-th power. But they aren't quite as bad as the green-bs commercials: Chevron telling us "imagine that, an oil company as part of the solution". If the corporations spent as much acually doing something as they do trying to pursuade us that they are doing something, some of the problems these ads address might move a mite toward resolution. But my fear is that the captains of industry are sucked in by their own propaganda and believe these ads ("hey, you can't tell us we aren't green; we do ads saying we are").