“Fuck this guy and fuck his raping of our night skies. Fire him into the fucking sun. Billionaires are a planetary cancer.”
That was a tweet written by one Alan Baxter a few weeks ago. Thousands of other people wrote equally outraged Tweets, while a few had deep Tweet-thoughts like this:
“can you just ask him to do something abt climate change @Grimezsz”
@Grimezsz is the Twitter handle of Grimes, the Canadian singer and musician.
And the “him” in the Tweet above is Grimes’s boyfriend and well-known planetary cancer, Elon Musk. How quickly things change:
For many years and until what seems like yesterday, Musk was loved and celebrated by the mass mind.
His Tesla electric cars made it sexy to take smoke-billowing gas guzzlers off streets.
His Hyperloop concept promised a cool way to travel far without the environmental costs of airplanes and airports.
And his SolarCity company brought clean energy to hundreds of thousands of homes across America.
So what changed? Why the sudden outrage towards Musk?
What did he do to make his personal brand plummet… and to make people forget all about his solar energy company… and his electric cars… and his minimal-impact human gerbil tubes?
As you can imagine, it took something big.
It took a cardinal sin.
It took for Elon Musk to get into advertising.
Because the tweets above, and thousands like them, came after Musk announced his plans to put a “billboard satellite” in space.
In reality, Musk’s space billboard will be something like a 4-inch-by-4-inch TV, floating among all the other tin cans miles away from the surface of the Earth. It will be invisible from the ground. It certainly won’t rape anybody’s night sky.
And yet, people hate the idea of a billboard satellite. And they hate Musk for working on it.
Because, as you may have noticed, many people have an allergic reaction to advertising. And the numbers of the afflicted are growing.
You can see it in the blowback to Musk’s space billboard plan.
You can see it in the bubbling anger over online tracking and targeted ads. (Which, if anything, people should welcome, because it makes advertising more relevant to their needs, habits, and interests.)
And you can see it in the reports of big-name direct marketers, who say skepticism and indifference are rising, while conversion rates are dropping year after year.
So I’d like to suggest to you that this is a big problem.
And one way or another… if you are doing any kind of marketing, advertising, or proactive selling… and unless you want get out of business and go work for the federal government… then I’d like to suggest you have to face up to this problem and find ways to deal with it.
You can back away… and make your sales softer and more indirect.
Or you can get confrontational… and turn up your sales pitches while mocking those who object to your trying to run a business.
Or you can use subtle psychology to strike some sort of middle ground. That’s my preferred approach.
But whatever your preferred approach, you have to start thinking about it. And you have to start acting on it. Because if there is one thing that the growing numbers of people who hate advertising react to… it’s new advertising, which is just like the old stuff, only done a little bit better.
So that’s all. Except:
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