The Data Tail Wags The Cowardly Dog
All you write is quite true, John. And yet I wonder: if data is so great, why do we see diminishing returns on data-driven marketing campaigns for brands? Is the pinnacle of this type of thinking Pepsi’s spectacular failure with Kendall Jenner’s soda can peace offering? At least they didn’t have her give the cop a plastic bottle of Pepsi. How could Pepsi follow that spectacular tone-deaf ad with a series of absurd reductionist logos to “make the world a better place”?
This is the same company whose 2009 logo redesign — a simple red, white and blue image that most saw as a hasty reworking of the Obama logo — was presented as the logical end result of humanity’s collective history of art, science, genetic heritage and spirituality:
Yaaaassss!
Pepsi’s “I’d like to teach the world to sing” commercial is one of the world’s most legendary ad campaigns [note: Jason Stelzner points out that sappy ad was COKE … and he’s right!] Pepsi seems to have lagged behind the Coke ad machine and the best they came up with was “The Pepsi Generation” in the 60s. Pepsi did not seek to “make the world a better place,” they appealed to the younger generation — a generation that had similar concerns to today’s younger generation. Only today: everything feels worse. It isn’t — objectively — worse. It feels worse.
In-between the 60s and now, people have learned about the dangers of HFCS and highly-sweetened carbonated drinks. So, Kendall Jenner, a fake celebrity, offering one of these drinks to a militarized police officer, is rightly seen as the height of fake corporate messaging.
Trump is like a reality TV show: not reality. His general election opponent was a bad show that got cancelled.
People hunger for real nutrition, real connection, real expression, real agency, real opportunity, real hope, real friendship, real anything.
There was a high-minded message that resonated strongly with people during the last election campaign. “Not me:Us.”
It gave rise to an outpouring of hope, love, friendship, caring and meaning. It created an explosion of visual and musical creativity.
It seems natural to me to wonder why only two forced “choices” of leadership produced the very circumstances of which you complain. Why not mention briefly that “Not Me, Us” is a very different, aspirational, inclusive message to which millions responded.
Trump’s not classy, he’s not “well spoken,” and he has few claims to expressing any of the high-minded ideals so well-presented in your article. His opponent had all the appeal of Savonarola and none of the mean old priest’s sexy Hellfire and Damnation rhetoric (her friends sort of did, but that’s another story).
It is only about chasing money and meeting the personal taste of people in charge right now. There won’t be any new Pepsi competitor. There won’t be any better films, no better books, no good new music, no poetry renaissance, no improved education, no new tech that does anything other than funnel money, life and time upward to an ever-shrinking minority of parasitical power brokers.
We won’t be going to Mars anytime soon. Climate change will continue to worsen. Beachfront property will be, for a brief time, occupied by the homeless and destitute due to its gross devaluation right before it falls into the ever-rising tides.
There will be no cure for cancer. There might be some new, outrageously flavored breakfast cookie or savory oatmeal product we can squirt out of an insulated tube on the go.
Our morality will be dictated to us by women who got richer than the Queen of England off selling recycled fairy tales that reinforce every stereotype known to man including all girls get married at the end and live happily ever-after white nerd boys fight the bad mean monster man and kill him dead. And said individuals scream about anti-immigrant prejudice as said immigrants pile up like so many stacks of homeless and dying brown cordwood outside her palatial estate.
The IQ / “Pygmalion” study at Oak School to which you refer was conducted in 1965. Nearly all of the Oak School students are retired; some may, in fact, be no longer with us. In every school in this state, there are geniuses who never get the chance offered through the Oak School experiment. And, this has been going on for over 50 years.
Year after year after year, the bright child’s promise — not just in California of course, but everywhere — is extinguished by an uncaring teacher, a biased teacher, or simply in the vast majority of cases: a grossly overworked and absurdly underpaid teacher who is afraid their job will be snatched from them at any moment, and that they will be unable to afford to pay for a place to live in their retirement. In your city, I believe, teachers have been protesting for over a decade because they cannot afford even a studio apartment (including some without kitchens) and some commute up to 3 hours to get to and from work.
It’s really hard to encourage the genius in your classroom even if you recognize them, when you can barely put food on your own table.
This is beauty and promise and genius and love and brilliance and THIS IS WHAT YOUR WORLD DOES TO IT:
This is love and talent and gifts and generosity and greatness:
And this is Aaron’s cousin Orlando and a tiny sample of his brilliant artwork:
I don’t have to look back more than 50 years for leadership. I see it all around me. And I know what Dr. King did for us by sacrificing himself for that bullet, and the same with Gandhi. Every blessed one of them gunned down.
Did you know that was how our world repaid these leaders? Bobby and Jack Kennedy as well. Malcolm X.
This is where all the heroes have gone. It’s not YOU, it’s not THEM, it’s not ME.
It’s us.
Read comments — this is why I write — it is sure as hell not for the money and no: I’m not afraid of what happens to people who speak truthfully and have a care about others.
PS: you will love Aaron’s designs, please visit his shop.
