By the way, I got my certificates for shooting lessons (see first post). My brother and I will be making a trip to Vegas and later to Pahrump probably next year.
I have a strange love-hate relationship with advertising. I remember being in junior high and if I had some time to kill in the library I'd read Advertising Age. I subscribe to their daily newsletter to this day. What I notice these days is where they have their annual party. Cannes! When lots of money changes hands, there's always some that shakes off. Advertising and sales are naturally at the top of that heap. I sometimes wonder if I'm in the right business.
I remember griping about ads when I was a kid. My dad, a magazine writer, editor, and later publisher, pointed out that advertising paid for my groceries. He also mentioned Packard automobiles. According to him, Packard was the best manufacturer of the best cars. Everybody knew they made the best cars. So they took a decision to stop advertising. Not long after that, there were no more Packards. I just looked it up on Wikipedia and see no reference to the story. But there may be something to it. When I've fact-checked the old man on other topics, he usually does pretty well.
Mad Men
I've gotten hooked on the AMC TV show Mad Men. Now I've got my wife watching it.
The ironic thing about all this? I Tivo it and fast-forward through the ads. And when I read AdAge online, I filter the ads using a Firefox plugin called Adblock.
If you haven't watched Mad Men yet, I recommend it. If nothing else, it's a good TV date show. The lead character, Don Draper is a New York advertising executive who's in free-fall and hasn't noticed yet. It's 1958 or 1959. Reader's Digest has just published an article linking cigarettes and cancer. He has a wife and kids in the suburbs, a girlfriend in the city, and now appears to be chasing a department store owner's daughter who has taken operation of the store over from her father. He's a first-class jerk, and yet for some reason we care what happens to him. I foresee numerous dramatic meltdowns.
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