Social Media Theory posits that consumers have abandoned “traditional” advertising — both its media, like print or broadcast, as well as its content, which admittedly and obviously tries to sell something — and embraced “new” media, like online and mobile, where content cannot be overtly commercial. Its believers have been berating big brand name marketers for years to adjust their budgets in support of their beliefs, calling those who resisted it dinosaurs and heaping praise (and pitches for additional social spending) on those who did. An ecosystem of metrics has been created to substantiate proof of social success as stand-ins for the old-fashioned numbers of sales on which Luddite marketers once relied.

Judge was a brilliant follower of this canon, having launched Best Buy’s “Twelpforce” of store associates posting product Tweets (the company has almost a quarter million followers on Twitter), creating a set of online forums called “Unboxed,” and even writing his own blog. Klein oversaw BK’s cutting-edge collaboration with agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, which gave us viral videos of peasants encountering their first hamburgers, a broiled meat-scented cologne, and endless permutations of the brand’s iconic mascot showing up in ads, on Halloween masks, and as a protagonist in video games. Hayzlett is perhaps the most visionary pioneer, having brought every conceivable social media tool into play for Kodak and then going on to write a book and start a consultancy so that other rule-busting innovators can replicate his approach.

There’s only one problem. None of it worked. Sales at all of the brands crashed.

Well, it worked in terms of all the made-up metrics used to prove efficacy in social endeavors. These early-adopters did everything they were supposed to do, and they did it expertly, so Social Media Theory accounts for the subsequent sales failure with a simple conclusion: it wasn’t their fault. Other factors were at play, for which they had no responsibility. In fact, those factors were a drag at times on what were otherwise wildly successful endeavors. To hold Social Media Theory accountable for the sales shortfalls would be not only inaccurate but unfair.

But maybe the premise that people just want to be entertained with free stuff that gives them no compelling reason to buy stuff is responsible for why the customers of Best Buy, Kodak, and Burger King were happy to do anything for free but unwilling to buy anything? Perhaps the idea that they wanted to be friends of these brands was mistaken. It’s quite possible that allowing even a portion of the marketing spend to produce those glorious social metrics was a distraction from what the brands should have been doing to truly inform, motivate, and support real transactions (i.e. selling stuff) to people?

What if those CMOs who resisted the siren call to spend on social media aren’t dinosaurs at all, but rather Homo sapiens sapiens…and the folks who embraced Social Media Theory the Neanderthals?

Neanderthals had the larger brains, invented tools, language, and lived in complex social groups (they created the first apartment complexes, as one structure in Moldova contained 25 hearths). Only they couldn’t compete with Cro-Magnons, who did all of that only better and more often. So Neanderthals didn’t do anything wrong as much as didn’t have enough right going on to resist the encroachment of Cro-Magnons. One theory suggests that those who didn’t die were assimilated into the evolutionary tree of Homo Sapiens.

Similarly, those early-adopter CMOs weren’t wholly wrong any more than they were completely right. Social Media Theory prompted them to experiment, sometimes with the blind zeal of the faithful, and perhaps their job status (and the business failures they left in their wakes) are the true results of those tests. They can’t exist outside of the larger, more inclusive and reasoned path of evolution from which they once claimed to be distinct.

So skip the reptile analogies. Maybe we have been looking at a family squabble all along?

My Mom got her first computer a few years ago: a Mac mini, one generation prior to the current model. She discovered the miracle of email via her MobileMe account, and now can’t imagine living without it. Internet search is still a bit of a mystery to her (we crashed her system once because she managed to open over 100 browser windows at one time), but I have no doubt that she’ll figure that out, too.

A few weeks ago her Mac mail program stopped receiving emails, and a little looking revealed that we needed to move her to iCloud, the successor (and infinitely less robust) program to MobileMe. We did it, only her Mac mail still didn’t work. More sleuthing told us she needed to upgrade to Lion OS, which was a two-step move from her Leopard OS. $29 later and we had Snow Leopard working, only to learn that she didn’t possess enough RAM to run Lion. We ordered the memory from crucial.com for another $30 (great service, BTW) but then the guys at the Genius Bar told me they don’t install chips bought somewhere else (this Mac mini model is not customer-friendly in terms of swapping out memory, which I’ve done easily on two newer Macs). I told them they didn’t sell the RAM for the older Mac minis; they said “exactly,” and gave me a printout of “approved” third-party installers. I tried to find the first two on the list, but found myself in front of private residences, not stores. Weird.

And then I got to thinking. What was I trying to fix, exactly?

My Mom’s mail program was running just fine. She didn’t break anything. Apple changed the deal, demanding that we replace her program with one that is far inferior from a benefits perspective (no iDrive, for instance), and I was about to spend over $100 to buy the privilege of continuing to use Mac mail to access Apple’s new iCloud mail servers.

This isn’t the first time Apple has left older customers in the dust (I remember the upgrade from OS 8 to 9 rendered lots of programs inert). They do it on purpose, perhaps not out of spite to longstanding users, but because the math says they can screw them over and make up for it with some greater good. Or perhaps they think loyal customers will forgive them. Our situation wasn’t a glitch, it was the result of Apple’s business strategy.

Nope. I’m not playing.

I’ve got my Mom a Gmail account and now her Apple email forwards to it, so her friends don’t need to figure out how to change her email address. We’ll have to bite that bullet sometime down the road, but right now her now-outdated Mac mail program will run Gmail just fine. When she needs a new machine, I will get her a tablet from a company other than Apple.

I know Apple doesn’t need advice from anybody in the Universe when it comes to branding, but my gut tells me that devices are commodities, ultimately. I’m already having a hard time distinguishing iPhones from all of the other smartphones on the market. Ditto for tablets. What makes Apple (or any tech brand) unique is how it works…not technically, per se, but as a process and relationship between business and users…and it seems that Apple doesn’t care about those activities as much as I’d once thought.

Not even Apple can afford to lose a single customer for no good reason.

They enable us to actually talk to one another, and to remember things.

Our culture has learned to value things that are immediate, fast, and ephemeral. If you can’t express something in an instant it probably isn’t worth expressing, and certainly won’t get shared again. Ideas are literal bits of information that get plugged in or swapped out based on interests that change incessantly. This morning’s shocking news story will fade by this evening. What thrilled us today will be replaced tomorrow. What happened last week isn’t as much of a distant memory as it has been all but forgotten.

Have you listened to two people “discuss” something that really mattered to them? I’m thinking of the Tea Party protests at Congressional town hall meetings, or dysfunctional family members yelling over one another on the Jerry Springer Show. Welcome to conversation in the 21st century. Because anybody can be an expert on anything (and any belief is the same thing as certain knowledge), we are encouraged to talk more than listen, and to argue and flame instead of find common ground. Just read the comments that follow any online news story and you’ll see what I mean.

We have the capacity to communicate with one another on a basis both intimate and global, yet somebody misplaced the guide to how to actually talk. We have technology to blame for making possible our running case of collective amnesia, and only ourselves to hold to account for so willingly and blindly embracing the crappy conversational habits it enables.

But the laws upon which lawyers base their actions and that determine their successes or failures aren’t as fickle. Not by a long shot. In fact, while most of us blithely live in a state of constant now, lawyers are left to follow up on events in the past and demand our attention to them in the future. Their motivations are irrelevant and I make no value judgment on any single case, whether publicly huge or privately small.

Their very existence helps keep society responsible for its past.

Consider John Edwards. He was a Vice President and then Presidential candidate and fair-haired boy of the Progressive Left in America until very recently, when reports surfaced the he’d not only cheated on his cancer-stricken wife, but that she’d known about it and tolerated a cover-up that may have used campaign funds to hide the existence of his love child.

Do you think anybody would be following what happened next if there weren’t legal charges against him? Would any journalists take the time to research what he did and why he almost got away with it, or stay ready to issue corrections to the public record if past allegations are proved false?

Of course not. We’re all onto the political scandal du jour. Edwards is about as relevant to us today as Stephen Douglas (OK, maybe less so). If it didn’t happen 5 minutes ago, it’s not trending on Twitter, so who cares?

Same goes for the substance of conversation. A legal proceeding has explicit rules for what can be said when, and even tougher standards for what qualifies as evidence (i.e. proof isn’t the mere fact that you believe something, or fervently want it to be true). This overtly stifling process actually enables dialog in meaningful ways that are lost to us when conversation is online and optional.

Rules to guide conversation and a framework that allows people to seek truthful conclusions. Again, there are rotten lawyers and even worse cases…the whole Edwards thing might qualify on both counts…but I’m beginning to believe that using our judicial system is the only reliable way we can communicate and agree on anything anymore.

I never imaged I’d say it, but thank God for lawyers.

This is stupid advertising at its worst, isn’t it?

That’s not to say it isn’t entertaining. It makes no pretense of communicating anything even remotely interesting or useful, so it’s not as if the spots disappoint. The humor is obviously hyperbolic and the tone is totally self-aware, as if the campaign is making fun of itself. It’s a joke about a joke. No harm done, right?

And nothing accomplished, either.

I am regularly dumbfounded when marketers bemoan the fact that consumers don’t believe or rely on what brands want to tell them — or that it gets evermore difficult to overcome those hesitations — and then otherwise intelligent, creative agency and brand people conspire to produce dreck that confirms our worst suspicions about advertising.

It’s irrelevant. Entertainment. Untruthful, or at least devoid of truth. Not to be trusted. Disposable.

I guarantee that the folks in the brain trust behind this stuff are busy congratulating one another, using all of the outdated measures of views, clicks, and forwards to affirm their a priori conviction that the campaign was spot on. References in social media posts like this one are tallied, even negative responses characterized as “conversations” or at least “mentions” which are interpreted as net positives for the brand.

This is advertising conceived as a car wreck on the side of the road. Attention and impact, with no lasting effect whatsoever. Recollection when aided, maybe, but without relevance to any measures that actually get counted by the bean counters who count within the business. Oh, and correlating sales increases with inane marketing creative doesn’t even suggest causality. The sun rose and set during the campaign, too.

I simply don’t get it. We’re well into 2012 and we know that people are desperate for truthful, useful, and reliable information. We also know that attributes like authenticity and credibility aren’t only among the qualities that matter most to consumers, but that they are least likely to come wrapped in funny or snide advertising.  I’m all for wildly creative ideas but they need to fit into a broader strategy.

The brand had the right approach when it ran the brilliant The Man Your man Could Smell Like spots featuring Isaiah Mustafa doing overtly silly things. He appealed to women, who it turns out buy deodorant for the men and teenage boys in their households. The company front-loaded retail outlets with aggressive discounts so that when those shoppers did their weekly ministrations up and down the store aisles, the memory of Isaiah’s good-looking hilarity combined with the discounts put Old Spice products into shopping baskets.

Once on the list, the product became a repeat purchase, along with the brands of milk, cheese, and pretzels that regularly get bought. Whatever the social component of the strategy accomplished was after-the-fact and a pleasant, vague add-on, if anything, even though from how the marketing trades played it up you’d think the videos on YouTube were the crux of the campaign.

This Champion campaign suggests that the Old Spice marketers believe their own hype. I sure hope there are deep discounts at retail again, but my guess is the self-referential humor of the spots isn’t even remotely funny to women. So I get back to place from which I started. They’re just more stupid ads.

Stay tuned. The campaign’ll win an award this year, and lots of clicks will get correlated with the continued rotation of the Earth on its axis.

I’m thinking Nobel Prize.

This spot (Baby Driver) exhibits many qualities that make for brilliant, truthful advertising:

• Immediacy — There’s no complicated story to follow or concept to deconstruct. You get drawn into what’s going on immediately, and the “payoff” is equally obvious.

• Reality — Even though the sight of a kid behind the wheel is incongruous, the setting makes sense. It’s familiar and feels real, not contrived.

• Humanity — The ad isn’t about a Subaru brand attribute but rather a human condition that every parent has felt. The brand then attaches to it (vs. the other way around).

• Authenticity — Again, even though the kid doesn’t belong behind the wheel, there’s no storytelling “suspension of disbelief” required to understand the spot.

It’s also very telling that Subaru has been running the spot for almost two years, and it’s still as relevant and compelling now as it was when it debuted in 2010. Truths don’t change or depend on vicissitudes of fads or circumstances. Think how many other spots air that wouldn’t be anywhere near as durable, or even as compelling the first time around.

Now, quickly name another car spot that comes anywhere near this one.

I understand that the guy playing the dad in the spot is a dad in real life and riffed the lines instead of following a script. If it’s true, it shows, as the words he uses, and even his halting cadence, come across as heartfelt (the best actors blur the line between script and spirit).

As for Subaru, the company is on fire, returning consecutive months of increased sales and a first quarter of 2012 that was its best in its history. I wonder if the spot was happenstance and a glorious exception, or its strategists are finding other truths to communicate. I’d love to see more.

Instead, I see a variety of interests, shortcomings, and outright esoteric beliefs playing themselves out. It’s fascinating stuff for marketers to consider because it illustrates how convoluted and uncontrollable any “conversations” can become that might involve a brand. Exploring it might help us see what’s going on in the debate, too.

Here are three observations:

First, it’s accepted wisdom that education is the key to the middle class. It sounds good but it’s just not true. A ‘middle class’ positioned between the abject poor and stunningly rich was a creation of:

• Post-WWII production capacity (we were the only country with factories and a transportation network that hadn’t been reduced to rubble)
• Available workers (we’d lost so many in the war but had so many more people still at home)
• A pro-commercial success national character (no institutional class system meant everyone could aspire to succeed, and buying things was an overt symbol of such success) and, more than any of those points,
• A union movement that secured contracts for workers that paid them enough to step out of poverty.

The American middle class wasn’t full of people who were smarter or better educated than anyone else. They were luckier, perhaps harder working, and definitely better protected by unions that saw the opportunity to make demands if said workers were going to produce products for the entire world to consume.

Now, as the middle class disappears before our eyes, it’s not because they’re uneducated, but because those other qualities that made its existence possible are changing or are already gone. No amount of schooling will change those trends. To suggest otherwise is too glib and insulting, and it serves to “outsource” responsibility for addressing changes that are larger than any of us to each of us individually. It’s not only not fair but it’s not a reasonable policy decision.

Second, testing standards make for better educations. If you have kids in grade school you know that contrary to all of the testing, there are no standards anymore. Every kid succeeds, just differently. This was made crystal clear to me years ago when my daughter came home from third or fourth grade and explained that getting the exact answer in math wasn’t important; she’d been taught how to get close to it.

This is a huge flip-flop from the way education was administered not just in our past, but across the planet over the past few thousand years. The good news is that this means lots of kids who would have otherwise given up on schoolwork (and the life dreams commensurate with it) are sticking with it. The bad news is that we may be producing a new generation of future-workers who have a really skewed self-image and don’t possess the skills — functional or emotional — to deal with the trials and tribulations of adult life that should and will legitimately test them.

We can test them up the wazoo but it’s not really helping prepare them for life if they’re not being educated in an environment in which absolutes of fact and experience are acknowledged on a daily basis. There are a variety of group interests and personal biases at play on this one. Few of them have anything to do with (or expert knowledge of) education.

Third, and this is the biggie, teachers are responsible for their students’ success and should be held accountable for it. The corollary belief is that teachers’ failures to do so (and the unions’ work to protect said failed educators) are the problem in education today.

Both statements are purposeful, idiotic lies.

Holding teachers accountable for the success of every kid is like blaming a chef for how much or little people eat in a restaurant. Sure, the quality of the food matters in a meaningful and expansive way, but it’s only one of many variables that affect the outcome of a dining experience:

• What if somebody arrives already full?
• What if the other people at the table keep one another from eating?
• How about if the eater has a deep aversion to the type of food being served?
• What if the restaurant fixtures are filthy, decrepit, or don’t function?

Though there are most likely bad teachers at work here and there across the country, blaming teachers for circumstances that are far beyond their purview (let alone control) is as dishonest as telling workers that their only way of getting back into the middle class is to get an education.

Add on top of it the silly premise that every kid in class is going to succeed — we all know they won’t, even if we as parents hope and believe that our own kids will be among those who do — and you get a nonsense concoction of wrong premises, incorrect causes, mistaken targets, and foolish remedies. They’re all interrelated, confusingly so, and no debate about education will ever yield actual improvements until we step back from all of the political, philosophical, and personal biases and agendas and talk about reality.

And you think the conversations about your toothpaste or insurance brand are any more coherent?

If it happens, the new carrier will still slash thousands of workers, erase duplicative routes, and find other ways to save money. There are investment bankers and management consultants who specialize in these sort of match-ups between distressed partners, and the airline industry specializes in providing them with willing victims (many high fixed-costs and vagaries of oil prices and weather make turning a profit about as reliable as winning at blackjack).

The branding of such mergers is also predictable: Management will publish public “letters” full of highfalutin language about A New Beginning for the company and  image ads will promote some permutation of We’re Back message (smiling workers interspersed with gleaming planes against bright blue skies). The brand absorbed in the merger (likely US Air) will see its plane tails repainted, perhaps with some logo that combines the two carriers’ symbols and was designed by a pricey branding consultancy.

And then the service hiccups will resonate through the operational systems that don’t link-up perfectly and can’t get fixed fast enough because there aren’t enough people to do it thanks to those staff reductions identified by the management consultants. Airport lines will get longer. Bags will get misplaced. The staff that survives the cuts will have to work harder and longer, probably for no more money and quite possibly for less, and they’ll have to look forward to a future of less job security and lower benefits (if any) if they make it to retirement. And then there’ll be massive thunderstorms and another oil price shock.

So even if the new airline finds ways to minimize these shortcomings in the short term, it will still face them in the longer-term, just as United/Continental and Delta/Northwest do. We know it. The airline industry stinks. It’s funny, but I predict that we won’t see one media type point this out as coverage of the American/US Airways saga unfolds.

If ever there were an opportunity to think about an airline merger differently, however, now is the time to do it.

Instead of using the same old worn-out consultant PowerPoints about synergies and efficiencies, why not imagine new ways to approach an airline brand? What could the new business do better and differently than the old one…from a customer perspective, not in terms of reducing the sheets of toilet paper used by employees or other cost-control measures? How could it address obvious, chronically under-addressed problems with flying — delays, the hell of carry-on stuffing, endless add-on costs, the increasing impossibility of using miles to get an actual seat when you want one — with creative, customer-facing solutions? Might there be ways to use the extended social communities of fliers of both carriers to partner with them in the process now, not later on when it needs them to roll over and accept the fait accompli, and do so in meaningful and binding ways (perhaps literally give them skin in the game in exchange for their support)?

Ultimately, the beautiful image ads and new logo on the airplane tails will matter to nobody except the pricey consultants who’ll get paid for producing them. What’ll matter to fliers is how a new American/US Airways delivered its “product” in tangible, objectively real ways.

The cost-cutting plan isn’t the operational plan any more than hiring image consultants will constitute the branding plan. There’s only a single plan that meshes operations with experiential outcomes. Everything else is incidental.

I say all this with a vested interest: I’m a lifetime uber-level AAdvantage member, and I want the new airline to succeed. So I am publicly offering my help free of charge to American and/or to US Airways. Let’s sit down and I’ll brainstorm with you what the opportunities might be (as there are many), and I bet we’d come up with ideas that are far better than the few I listed in this essay.

If not, I’ll just wait for those beautiful ads and PR announcements and, like most of the other fliers of either airline, I’ll probably start shopping on price.

Guess what? There’s no such thing as “the brand.” It has no consciousness or personality. It can’t do things. It simply isn’t.

There are businesses run by people who make decisions and take actions. Awareness, opinions, and feelings among people are driven by those actions.

Brands are the aggregation of those perceptions and emotions. They’re fluid because the aggregation changes moment-to-moment. A due host of inputs affect those moments, most of which are environmental, circumstantial, and quite often unpredictable.

Consumers don’t “own” brands any more than companies do. Brands are mirrors. Narratives with many authors. Topics that people talk about. Mental constructions that reveal themselves through description, however imperfectly, and through purchase and other experiences, more directly.

Many marketers think otherwise. It’s why so much marketing presumes to describe or stay true to brands. It’s why lots of branding is introspective, intended to get people to think or do things that are relevant back to brands. It’s why the world gets evermore amounts of branded content, conversations, and communities.

And it’s why so much of the stuff fails. Nobody cares about it. Worse, few people believe much of it. Semantics matter, and the definition of brand as “a thing” is as outdated as it is ineffective and costly.

Instead, marketers could focus on finding and sharing the truths upon which awareness, opinions, and feelings are based. Approach their work as guardians of those truths, and act as the creative souls who make them accessible and reliable for everyone else. Make a point of knowing and addressing people’s needs and interests versus serving their own requirements.

Stop trying to control what people think or their experiences. Simply contribute uniquely truthful substance to their lives, and let their interpretation and use define the brand.

Our technologies have changed. So has our culture, and the economics that underpin the markets in which businesses compete. 

Isn’t it time we changed our definition of brands, too?

Of course, this will have the effect of making liquor more appealing to kids than ever before.

Telling people no, or making things hard to get usually increases their perceived value (we had this little experiment in America called Prohibition, and it didn’t work too well). Keeping adult stuff out of the hands of minors is tantamount to teasing them to grasp at it. It’s what kept girlie magazines in business over the years.

The alcohol execs must be laughing over their accomplishment.

We have similar practices already in place in the U.S., but they’re a joke. Ads can’t appear in media with lots of underage readers as subscribers, but how are actual readers kept away? They’re not. Some social media and all web sites are required to ask for visitors’ ages, but we all know how enforceable that is.

And even if it all worked, the real influencers on kids are the programming between the ads and the other kids with whom they interact via social media.

Just watch 5 minutes of Jersey Shore, or go to most any coming-of-age teen movie in the theaters. Ask any teenager you know if they know a peer who drinks, or whether some, most, or all if the parties they’ve attended over the past few months served liquor. Popular media celebrates drunkenness among the underage set, even when it only tolerates it.

Alcohol brands couldn’t buy better marketing. Well, actually, they support such content for this very reason (my gut opinion, not a tidbit of research).

If the industry were really interested in telling the truth about drinking, it would find ways to communicate how unsuitable and unattractive it is to teenagers. Show them gruesome car deaths when teens drink and drive. Share real-life stories from girls who were abused or otherwise emotionally hurt when they were drunk and defenseless. Point out that nobody looks cute or fun or smart when they’re drunk, and that any teen who thinks otherwise is ugly, boring, and stupid. Doing so would be a creative and strategic challenge, since it would require brands to challenge the very reasons why they’re attractive to one consumer group in order to dissuade interest from another. It’s doable, I know that much, since there are many other “adult” activities that present no enticement to teenagers. Paying taxes. Getting a good night’s sleep. Whatever.

The problem with this latest example of self-regulation from the European liquor brands is that very gesture to keep teens away from all of the glorious and attractive marketing delivered in support of alcohol won’t do anything but make it more enticing. Look for sales to go up before governments step in and do their jobs.

The TV was tuned to Fox News, which gleefully lingered on the controversy between Ann Romney and Hilary Rosen over the Democratic consultant’s comment that Romney “hadn’t worked a day in her life” (she’s the wife of multimillionaire candidate Mitt Romney and had worked at home raising their five boys). Romney created a Twitter account to launch her response, which was to cast the remark as an attack on the “life choice” of stay-at-home moms. She went on to repeat the theme on cable news shows. Panels of pundits were convened to debate what democrats really thought about motherhood. The Republican National Committee called on the Democratic Party to issue a formal apology to Mrs. Romney and all moms everywhere.

Everybody apologized, from Ms. Rosen to the White House. The story seems to have died out, but don’t count on it. Republicans are using it to fundraise. Democrats are using it to prompt debate on women’s issues.

I hate politicians for this stuff, and I hate the news media that enables it.

Rosen wasn’t insulting moms in the interview, but rather commenting on the fact that Mitt Romney himself had said he got his info and insights into what matters to women from his wife and that, since Mrs. Romney had never worked to support a family the way so many other women, she wasn’t the best source of intel on that voting block.

More broadly, it has been reported that candidate Romney is trailing President Obama among those voters by a wide margin. This is because of the ugly washover from the policies Republicans have pursued at the state level (ultrasounds required for abortions because women can’t be trusted to make abortion decisions) and nationally (the Paul Ryan budget slashes funds that hundreds of thousands of women depend upon). Mitt Romney had to approve of these activities, whether overtly or by omission, in order to survive his party’s primaries.

The Democrats pounced on these facts to tag the Republicans as waging a “War on Women,” which is about as truthful as the Republicans claiming every year that a secret cabal of secular humanists are waging a “War on Christmas.”

The only war underway is The War On The Truth. And we’re the losers.

Everybody knows the facts. The politicians know what one another is doing and why. So do the newscasters. We know most of them, whether we choose to fully comprehend or deal with them. Yet we all pretend like there’s a “controversy” based on less than a sentence of words uttered in answer to a question during a live interview by a private individual (who happens to be a Democratic consultant but is otherwise unaffiliated with the Obama administration or reelection campaign). We accept another kabuki drama in lieu of actual news.

In their defense, the politicians are doing nothing less than brand marketers do every single day:

• Taking a sliver of something that’s truthful — In this case, the offending comment — and elevating it to gigantic proportions. BP did something similar when it built a decade-long brand campaign on the incomprehensibly little investment it made in alternative energy (dubbing itself “Beyond Petroleum”). Tylenol has built its reputation on recommendations by doctors when it bought them by distributing vast amounts of free samples for them to give to patients. It’s standard practice for brands.

• Inventing a strawman to talk about — The Democrats invented the “War on Women” theme based on elements of Republican policy efforts that weren’t necessarily connected by anything more than vague ideology, and gave it a name. Then the Romney campaign tried to change the subject by getting news pundits to talk about some vague liberal bias against non-job-market-competing women. Both are “strawman” purposefully set up to attack…and done so knowing that they’re both untrue. Brands do it all the time when they knock the competition (just remember the “I’m a Mac” spots, for instance).

• Ignoring the truth altogether — The truth that matters to voters in this Presidential election is whether they prefer the policies delivered by the Democrat or proposed by the Republican. Instead of providing a place to understand and vet them — say, a news studio, or truly independent and thoughtful debate — we get the tit-for-tat bickering about posture and intention. And we like it, almost as if it’s more comfortable to base our voting preferences on what we feel vs. what we know. That’s exactly how a lot of brands want consumers to think. Skip the facts and details and buy based on your emotions.

The media are doing the same thing, too, in that they cover the latest business news of, say, a merger as if the last 99 of them didn’t fail. They report new brand strategies and campaigns without the slightest context or truth (so we get Google “waging war” against Yahoo, or whatever).

I think that’s why so many consumers have learned to ignore what we hear from/about brands. It’s the same for politics, only politics matter more. It stinks.