(graphic from ihatebillboards.com)

You raved about advertising last night, and it was so easy to believe that you were wrong. Now I see that we were standing in the only spot where I could win. Next to a life-size replica of the mousetrap game, you told me that no one works for free. You said Wikipedia is going to fail because experts will never donate their time. Silhouetted in the apocalyptic glow of home-made fire art, you were preaching, saying advertising is the only option we have, saying commerce is the only real thing.

Sure, I said, deadpan. We all gotta eat. 

I was smirking, but today is Monday. At rush hour, I know I’m going against the tide. I spend a lot of time with very busy people who, economically speaking, don’t produce shit. The work I sometimes do has the cachet of underground. You have to know the right warehouses. It’s exclusive, but mostly it’s exclusive because you have to be willing to put your excess wealth into making your own culture. But what we do, it never put up skyscrapers. It has no market. It never built Rome, or railroads. You know better. You put such power into logos that the Khoasan Road bootleggers label their shoes “Nike” and the first hamburger place in Cambodia uses McDonanld’s colors. 

But this isn’t about globalization. It’s about you.

Back when we met, click-through was a means, not an end. We sat on the B-school lawn and told ourselves that the older generation were fools, that they had no idea what was good in life. We would only put our creative energies into projects we believed in, even if we weren’t quite sure what those might be. We were never going to work in a cubicle. We would never pitch a campaign to make insurance sexy. Then you got the offer you couldn’t refuse, and every new offer was a hard line pushed out a little bit further. You began to eat well, to afford health insurance, to think about having a family. The shine came off poverty, the outlines of reality shifted, and with them, the possible.

Now you sit in meetings where people say “monetize” without irony.  

You take in the company meeting and nod your head to the stock price. You tell me that open source is ridiculous, because actually Google funds Firefox and Ubuntu funds Linux. And Web 2.0 is for connecting with people — the people you want money from. And Facebook is for demographics, and viral marketing is culture, and when you did edit Wikipedia, you wrote:

A lifestyle brand provides a powerful supplement to the core identity of the customer.

When I read that, I knew the final person you’d convinced was yourself. You think you’re doing a good thing. And you’re probably right. The world really does work this way, because everywhere I’ve ever been, aspiration means money. And money means getting people to buy.

But you’re safe here, tonight. No one is watching. They don’t care if you believe, only if you deliver. So have another drink and let’s say it out loud, together, cut through and admit it: nobody actually likes advertising.

Unfortunately, it’s also a fake. The video is totally awesome, to use the technical term, but a large part of its awesomeness derives from the fact that some ordinary person not only came up with this completely implausible idea, but executed it brilliantly for no discernible reason. That makes it art, if only because we  don’t have many other good names for this type of behavior. One of the millions of untrained, unlicensed plebes rose up and did something amazing, and it’s inspiring precisely because it makes us think that we just might be able to do it ourselves. It’s our art.

Except that “we” didn’t do it. The video was produced by creative agency Droga5, according to the credits on this page, which also lists the CG animators. Doubly fake. Not only was this piece created as a viral marketing ploy for Guitar Hero, but the events in the video never actually happened.

“Authentic” is very hard to define. It’s easy to give flip answers like “love, not money,” but plenty of good art has been created to pay the rent. For an internet example, take the brilliant “OK Go on Treadmills” video. Sure, they did it to sell their album, but somehow it feels very “real”. I also like to imagine the jazz and blues musicians of old New Orleans, playing in the clubs every night. They were great artists, but they were working artists. Conversely, real culture can be executed as fake, like faux-Irish pubs all over the world. While any idiot can throw up dark wood paneling and serve Guinness, it’s not hard to tell when you’re being scammed for the tourist dollar. The trouble is, I’m often very hard pressed to say precisely what it is that makes one Irish pub phony and another authentic. Is Bike Hero no longer art now that we know who paid for it?

The only certainty I can fine here is that I don’t like being lied to. Undercover marketing is designed to make us believe that it’s not marketing at all, and that makes it the eptiome of inauthenticity. For this reason I have to give Bike Hero two thumbs down.

Water shipped from Fiji is being advertised as environmentally friendly. Wow.

One sustainability blogger estimates that the total amount of water used to produce and deliver a single one liter bottle of imported water is 6.74 liters, and 250 grams of greenhouse gases are released.

The company claims that it intends to become carbon neutral, but not actually: they’re buying carbon offsets, which don’t actually reduce the quantity of greenhouse gases emitted into the atmosphere (This is because there is no international framework to incrementally reduce the total number of credits available.)

There’s really no way around the fact that shipping water across the ocean in small plastic bottles is just a much dumber idea than getting it locally through pipes.

I mean, c’mon people.

Several friends have written to me about my piece on Gore’s Sustainable Electricity Challenge, trying to answer the question of how you make climate change mitigation sexy. One person argued that it’s all about associations. When people think of oil they need to think of black goo, the agony of war, evildoers and open sores. When they think of sustainability they should imagine pretty young people, green trees, crystal waterfalls and shining futures. This idea of associations is at the core of classic marketing and public relations techniques. Hence, the Biodiesel Hottie.

I mentioned this to a friend and he instantly translated the central meaning: “preventing the collapse of civilization gives me a boner!”

Well, yes. That is sort of what a hot body in biodiesel bling says. From this ridiculousness he argued that real social change had to include deep education at the primary and secondary school level. I agree completely — but we still need marketing, because, near as I can tell, people don’t actually base the vast majority of their opinions on critical thinking. This should not be shocking.

The argument against a clever, targeted public relations campaign to instill a lust for the Right Thing — sustainability — is that marketing sells image, not substance. Education makes people smarter, marketing makes them stupider, and so it’s entirely possible for people to “buy into” the image of sustainability without actually making any difference. We could all be walking around wearing our BIODIESEL baby-Ts, our fair-trade hemp jeans, listening to some fresh new update of Midnight Oil’s classic enviro-hit Beds Are Burning on our recylable greenPods and all the while continuing to drive our fossil-fuel cars to work. (And to live shows, of course.)

Put another way, we don’t want consumers, we want responsible citizens.

And yet, our world is heavily mediated by the messages we receive, because there’s simply too much world for us to figure it all out ourselves. Marketing sustainability is about more than getting 14 year old girls in Burbank to say things like, “oh my god! Carbon emissions are so disgusting!” It is about that, but it’s also about those who consider themselves generally awake, because even intelligent, caring, and otherwise conscious people can’t do an in-depth study of everything.

Our internal worlds are shaped by a mad swarm of “background” attitudes that we acquired without consciously choosing them. Here in California, smoking is generally considered just as gross as global warming. But why? Thirty years ago, it was awfully cool. Did the general public start reading the oncology, cardiology, and epidemiology journals and discover that (oh my god!) cigarettes are actually bad for your health? Of course not. Instead there was a massive public relations campaign to shape our perceptions. Only we called it a “public health” campaign, because no one likes to be told what to think.

This is about cultural context. This is about culture. This is about those associations I mentioned. Education and science and actual, you know, facts are critical, but the symbols we use in setting up the background assumptions of our society are important too. And we badly need new ones. For example I’m pretty sure that “eco-” has to go. “Eco-” has lost it’s original meaning of “ecological.” Now it sort of means “crappier than before” (eco-detergents like vinegar that don’t clean very well) or “inconvenient” (eco-friendly reusable bags that you always forget to bring to the store), or it might mean nothing at all, having become merely a market-speak word like “premium.” I bet it also invokes “hippie ” for a lot of people, and whatever that movement’s lasting cultural influence may have been, for many, many Americans today “hippies” are too closely associated with unshaven deadbeats, scratchy natural fibers, and a weird a-scientific love of hemp

Marketing is not a dark art. It’s just often used for dark things. If we’re serious about changing the way that that those who have not thought closely about sustainability think about sustainability — this would be almost everyone — then we have to understand what tools are available to shape perceptions. Oil has to be gross, sustainable energy has to be hot. Sure, we also need people to know why oil is gross, but that’s not enough.