"How in the Sam Hill could you end up dead?
Hadn't you lived according to the ads?"

Sigh. We marketers are a rotten lot. My hope? That times such as these (companies encouraged to do more good) and technologies like this--where we can be more open and far more accountable--will allow us to do more good.

I wrote a post about 2 weeks ago telling marketers to save the world (calling on more to move such initiatives like green programs forward, and in far more clever ways). In it I said this: "I don't think the world revolves around marketing (or marketers). But I am convinced marketing drives many of the world's decisions."

With the smarts and savvy we hold surely we can make money and still look out for people (and the earth). And I'd sure like to see marketers being credited for doing more good for the world...rather than being (understandably) blamed for so many of its ills.

Wow good find Ann. Explains why marketers are viewed as being 'less honest' than lawyers and used car salesmen.

I thought the poem was an interesting historical commentary, and well-founded, certainly. All those things were indeed marketed as such.

But marketing reflects the times, right? Can marketing/advertising be responsible for lackluster infant nutrition? Skyrocketing diabetes? Asbestos insulation? Etc.? Marketing's role is part of a larger picture. In other wors, marketing does drive decisions, to quote CK, but the decisions are set on their path well before marketing enters into the picture.

That being said, 2.0 technologies do demand us all to be accountable and transparent, at many levels. Which is a very good thing.

Oh -- and an occassional reminder from the likes of XJ Kennedy doesn't hurt, either....

Good point Ann, for example, is it that we want to eat healthy, or that we want to be told that the unhealthy food we eat now, is actually healthy? Remember those short-lived KFC spots from a few years ago where they claimed that eating their fried chicken would help you 'lose' weight, because it had less fat than a Whopper?

I think it's a little of both.

Marketing -- or certainly advertising -- inspired a lot more than poetry. I can't think of specifics right now, but ad slogans and jingles and marketing promises pop up in lots of popular culture -- especially music and movies.

Don't worry. Just wait. All those bad things will be good again. We just need a new generation of "researchers" to get tenure.

Sugar is good again, by the way. Eggs were good, then bad, and now (I think) good again. Lead is still bad, but I'm sure the PVC tubes we know today will be soon shown to cause some psychotic condition. And instant coffee is just un-American, as every other post here at The Prof's would surely agree.

Tastes, practices, and "knowledge" all seem pretty fickle when viewed against a fairly broad swath of time, don't they? Don't blame the marketers. Blame the markets.

Reminds me of this old Adbusters Spoof Ad: http://adbusters.org/spoofads/misc/ethiceze/

(You may recall Adbusters' lawsuit with major broadcasters - they had their spoof TV spots featured on CNN recently...)

Well, I wrote an epic poem about Enron in business school. Rhyming makes some things much easier to digest. I think I learned that from an episode of Happy Days.

Hey. Wow. A marketing Poet!
I used to write economic Haikus.
Reminds me of the scene from the Tom Cruise movie "cocktail" - where he recites a poem as the "last barman poet"