As marketers I feel like we have a duty to our clients, but we also have a duty to ourselves and the world around us to not just churn out message after message without understanding the implications on societal behavior.

Forbes recently had an article on how porn in advertising positions companies as “edgier” and how the fashion industry has jumped all over it. At the end of the article they ask the question “Is this smart marketing?”

They should really ask the question “Is this lazy marketing?” We all know sex sells but when marketers choose this path it always seems to me as the easy way out. Does this approach ultimately undermine our objectives as it invariably demeans the target of the marketing, whether it is perfume or beer.

Marketers, (and I speak to myself, as well) why not challenge ourselves to come up with ideas that are edgy because they celebrate intelligence and not demean it?

Everyday, we as marketers perform a balancing act of making sure we deliver material that is creative, meet’s the client’s needs and relates to the target audience. We ask ourselves:

- Will the target audience respond to this the way we want them to?
- Will the client like the work we are doing?
- Can we stay within budget and deliver on time?

But we’ve lost our sense of social responsibility in the everyday grind of getting it done. We need to add to the list of questions:

- How does this affect society? Does it harm or help?

In an ideal world we would be able to have a very clear distinction between harmful and helpful, but most often we fall into the gray zone. By just asking the question we take the first step forward and create an awareness of good intentions. We then make it possible to form habits that will help differentiate between helpful and harmful.

At the end of the day everyone wants to feel proud of the work that they do and taking the lazy way doesn’t get you there.

There are bubbles and then there are bubbles. Analysts have been worried about the imminent burst of the “video bubble” at least since last April. The Google/YouTube deal in concert with a few other acquisitions has made them more vocal. It’s just a little unclear what they are actually afraid of. The worse case scenario seems to be a shortage of video content or maybe video sites and the negative impact that would have on THE MARKET. In other words they seem to see similarities in the current activity to the events that led up to the Internet Bubble bursting back in 2000-2001.

Let’s look closer. Big numbers are being thrown around again, but now they have real businesses behind them. False starts are occurring and money will be lost. But the market is much less driven by this sector. Most critically this bubble isn’t going to burst, because of one critical similarity between IT and the events of the past.

In 2000, while the Internet crashed the market, consumers’ interest and loyalty in the Internet just grew. Ironically after that Bubble was done and gone more people were online, doing more things, more often. That trend has continued. Similarly, no matter the fate of video sites consumer interest in viewing, making, and sharing video will not falter. Just check out these numbers:

54% of online consumers shoot video on a cell phone, digital camera or video camera.
11% upload to the Web.

The delta between these two numbers is what analysts should be looking at. There is the indicator for growth of the online video market. As this delta closes - and it will - everyone will see the current video bubble for what it is, the next stage in the evolution of mass communication, with all the business opportunities and challenges usually associated with such an event. A “Bubble” doesn’t begin to describe it.

When I went to MLB.com today to see if the starting pitchers had been announced yet for game one of the World Series, I was presented with an opportunity to watch an exclusive Taylor Hicks performance. What team does he play for again? For those of us who are not big pop culture junkies, they tell us that he “was the winner of the World Series of TV music competitions,” American Idol. Oh…that Taylor Hicks.

But my question is, why would anyone visiting MLB.com care? What does this have to do with baseball? Why is this featured homepage content on the Major League Baseball web site?

It would be one thing if MLB.com offered exclusive performances of musicians doing songs about baseball; that would make some sense as a tie-in. But that’s not what this is. This promotion is irrelevant to baseball and out of place on MLB.com.

Something else must have been on Steve Jobs’ mind during an interview with Newsweek.com when the Apple CEO made two oddly suggestive comments about the iPod.

When asked if he was worried about the iPod not being cool anymore since it is so popular, Jobs responded with, “That’s like saying you don’t want to kiss your lover’s lips because everyone has lips.”

Uh…ok. If you say so.

Later in the interview, Jobs dismissed Microsoft’s Zune media player’s ability to share music wirelessly saying, “By the time you’ve gone through all that, the girl’s got up and left! You’re much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you’re connected with about two feet of headphone cable.”

Steve, dude, I just wanted to listen to some music, not make out!

Yes, Fr-Ajax [fr-ey-j-a-x]. Frame-based-Asynchronous JavaScript. It’s here to stay. Well, not really, it was here to stay in 1999, on a project I worked on, but got scrapped - probably because it was too cool - before it ever launched, and in my never-ending quest to become Master of All Media and Inventor of the Universe, I feel gypped.

Let me back up a bit. I am totally behind on the Ajax wave. I just finished playing with a couple of demos on my local box. And it’s exactly what it’s supposed to be: easy, fast, seamless, a great interface helper. For me this is liberating: remote connectivity and activity is seamless, back-grounded, and independent of the current URL state, and user interaction is freed from the typical HTTP-Request -(Wait)- Response-and-Load format — I’m ecstatic, as I can now control one more facet of a visitor’s experience to my site.

It prompted a few thoughts for me though: it’s just a matter of time before the experience is elevated to the better Flash experiences. What does this do to Flash? Will it slowly be abandoned for the non-proprietary technology? Isn’t this DHTML? And most importantly, shouldn’t my 1999 team & I get credit for inventing it? Ok, so we didn’t use XMLHttpRequest, and cross-browser JavaScript support was a joke (we developed in Netscape 4.x, then, contrary to best practices moved to the more unpredictable but, as it turned out, stable MSIE 4), and we were using a dozen or so hidden frames to send and return data requests on demand, but it was the same idea, right? Anyway, I’m hooked now, AJAX is great, and my decade-old struggle to elevate DHTML as an attractive and easy-to-use interface up and over the top of the web-gui heap has been re-ignited.

Down with misused, abused, bandwidth-hogging, proprietary plugins! Up with DHTML!

As TechCrunch first reported and the WSJ confirmed Google has put a 10 digit bid on the table for YouTube, and the founders are sitting down to talk.

For the analysts the first questions will be all about the money? The value? Will Google ever make it back? The second set of questions will focus on implications for major competitors; Yahoo and the all but moribund AOL. All of this will take much time and many blogs, columns, and words.

But let’s skip ahead to the broader implications of this deal, whenever it is finalized.

The sale of YouTube signals a change in the game for all the players involved in the on-going merger of Video and the Web. The idea that video is the way people share their experiences is no longer in the proof of concept stage. It’s a given.

Now we are on to Level 2. Who can improve consumers’ experience with Video the fastest? What was about community, now changes to utility. In other words every video community site that expects to survive on offering just sharing and storage can turn off their servers and go home.

Videoegg and Jumpcut (Yahoo’s purchase was prescient) are the beginning but that’s all they are. Consumers need editors that weren’t designed by video-editors (think point and shoot, not SLR) and tools to find and manage all the video they are playing with. They need ways to get all their Video in one place, regardless of the source, plus the ability to share across all of the appliances they now view videos on. And it all has to be easy, easy, easy. These are the tools that will determine the winners of the Video-Web game two years from now.

So that is where the money will go. Once all the other questions are answered.

Because drunk drivers, cell-phone maniacs and narcolepsy don’t cause enough highway fatalities, Volkswagen has come up with a whole new way to distract the driver: play a guitar in the car. What else would you do with an electric guitar that can plug into the VW’s sound system? A new Volkswagen promotion puts customized guitars with the special feature of plugging into the VW’s sound system into the hands of buyers of designated 2007 and select 2006 models. Whether the guitar is intended for the driver or a passenger is unclear. Nor do I seriously think this will impact highway fatality rates. It’s just so irrelevant to the Brand and obviously designed as a slim excuse to run pseudo-iPod ads that it’s, well, embarrassing.

But I bet all the folks that found the brilliant Safety campaign controversial will love this. It’s just so cool. Immediate Best Spot of the Month and numerous awards are in the wind. Too bad it won’t sell cars.

A new eMarketer report indicates that the population of 8-14 year olds online is rising and that they spent $9.7 billion online last year. Wow, sounds like a market ripe for tapping! Sure it does, if you’re the kind of scum that gives our industry a bad name!

The fact is, although selling intent is something that children can understand around 8 years of age and critical thinking skills are developed as pre-teens, a study by Elizabeth Moore and Richard J. Lutz (“Children and the Changing World of Advertising,” Journal of Business Ethics, 2004) shows that pre-teen children do not have critical thinking skills in concert with media literacy to understand commercial messages for what they are.

So please, even if they are spending (their parents’) money online, let’s be responsible about how we approach chidren with marketing messages. There will be plenty of time to build brand loyalty after our consumers are able to understand the concept.