Even as runaway greed is lambasted on Wall Street, festering consumerism is encouraged at the eighth annual seminar/festival/networking event for more than 70,000 advertising professionals and major clients.

As in every past year, multiculturalism in advertising will be applauded yet rarely utilized. One workshop entitled, “Where Are All the Black People?” shows that at ad agencies, things haven’t changed very much since the days of Mad Men. The biggest difference, of course, is that the early Madison Avenue types didn’t have to sit through endless discussion groups about social media “solutions.”

As the #OccupyWallStreet folks choke on tear gas and wave signs about bailouts and being in the 99 percent, ad industry types, who facilitate the consumer desire that lines Wall Street pockets, will be entertained by Andrea Mitchell and Brian Williams of NBC News, along with Steve Harvey, Jennifer Hudson, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Justin Timberlake.

The futility of the entire situation might have been unwittingly captured in this tweet from @KYColChad:

#OccupyWallStreet: If you are tweeting your anger about capitalism on an iPhone, think very hard about what that means…

To which I responded:

If not iPhones, what is the best product on which to tweet your anger over capitalism? #OccupyWallStreet

I would place divorcing ourselves from Wall Street and disconnecting from our mobile devices in the category called, “Putting the Toothpaste Back in the Tube.”

As an advertising professional myself, but one who does not own a T.V., I am often amazed and appalled at the state of our society as depicted and reflected in popular media. But if anybody out there can figure out how to tweet, or how to communicate ideas to lots of other people in general, without supporting either the financial or advertising industries, I’d love to hear the answer.

Russell Weiner, chief marketing officer for Domino’s Pizza, said what anyone who has worked with the wrong type of ad agency already knows.

You can waste a lot of time, money, and effort pursuing “cutting edge” creative that only entertains the staff members who get to spend all day in brainstorming sessions to produce campaigns that might win the agency another peer-awarded accolade. Meanwhile, your product or service treads water. Weiner:

Creativity isn’t everything. Base the creative solution in something not creative — which is real business insights, real consumer insights, real data insights — and use those as a springboard.

There’s no such thing as creative for creative’s sake. When you have a super creative agency, if you don’t have a strategy … it almost exacerbates the problem.

And by “super creative,” I think we all agree we mean agencies that create campaigns that rely on stunts, crowd sourcing with no staying power, and empty platitudes; and that lack understanding of your product or service, or its users.

Is it possible that someday we’ll look back wistfully at the age of Facebook and fondly recall when we were “friends” with everyone on the playground, even the smelly kids? As we await our Google+ invitations, the world shifts. Facebook has made us more like those guys were at the end of The Breakfast Club, looking at each other in new ways and finally reaching outside of our defined groups. It does look like Google+ has the potential to a big step backward.

When I heard Eduardo Porter on the Diane Rehm Show, I knew I had to get his book because how people make decisions is an area of fascination to me as a marketer. But when I went to Amazon to look for the The Price of Everything, I was blown away by this trailer. First of all, it’s really well executed. Second, what a great idea in this day of people who don’t read because the internet is rewiring our brains. Watch this fascinating animation.

I’m so glad I stumbled across Erik Proulx, his blog Please Feed the Animals, and this film, Lemonade. It begins from the old saying about how, when life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade (although I have to say, I prefer Tina’s version: “When life gives you lemons, throw those suckers in the garbage!”). But it presents neither unrelenting cheerfulness nor happy endings. Instead, it shows what happens to a group of former advertising people who have one thing in common — the shock of layoff — and the ways they changed their lives in the time that’s followed.

The film is well worth the 35 minutes it takes to watch, and if it doesn’t leave you questioning your own life choices and comparing them with what you once dreamed you would be, then you are just more together than a person has any right to be. The film is available in its entirety for free on hulu.

Penenberg chose to illustrate his definition of a viral loop, where “a company grows because each new user begets more new users,” with lessons from the 2008 presidential campaign. He said the first reason Barack Obama won was his presentation of, “a short, clear positioning statement:”

Unlike Hilary Clinton touting her “experience or John McCain bragging that “I have the record and the scars to prove it,” Obama’s two core messages were “Change” and Yes, we can.” A call to arms, these taglines offered supporters a clear rallying cry, while Clinton’s and McCain’s messages were more nebulous and top-down (that is, elect me because I’m more experienced). Obama’s campaign galvanized its supporters, who in turn virally extended his message.

I would go further and say that Obama’s message had little to do with what he would do and more about what WE could do. He ignited our imaginations simply by including us in the equation. With Clinton and McCain, the request for our participation stopped at giving them our votes. Obama, in contrast, asked us to be in a relationship.

Nothing is more annoying than a sales rep who just wants to make this one sale, and won’t take no for an answer because he or she isn’t listening to our reasons for not buying. Penenberg is right that “a short, clear positioning statement” is great, and I advise my clients to never give an audience two or more messages at once, but it doesn’t end there. People buy our product, or donate to our cause, or vote for us, or use our services to meet their own needs, not ours. It was this way long before Facebook but it’s never been more important to incorporate this simple truth into our marketing efforts.

So don’t tell them about you, ask them about them and then offer the answer: you.

Ever since people were given the opportunity to “like” things from the web at large, my news feed, and I’m sure yours, runneth over. I’ve hidden more friends (but not YOU!), I’m reluctant to accept offers to “like,” and I find myself spending less time on Facebook in general. The endless streams of who likes what are forcing me to acknowledge just how much of a time-waster Facebook is.

Before, I could focus on the social aspects, such as reconnecting with people I lost track of that I actually do like, and making new “friends” that I’ve never met or only know peripherally but enjoy trading witty or profound comments with. By hiding Farmville and its players, ignoring quizzes, and otherwise trimming the fat, I could feel that a lot of the time spent on Facebook was worth it, both personally and professionally. But Facebook is trying my patience.

I recently read that more people access Facebook than online porn, so that’s saying something. But if we continue to be asked to care what every single friend likes, who they’ve become friends with, AND how they scored on that quiz, I’m willing to predict that it won’t be long before we all begin to take a hard look at what we’re getting out of Facebook and how much time we’re putting in.

Even more potentially annoying is the Facebook version of Foursquare, wherein we can know the whereabouts of every friend at every minute of the day. Again, it’s not just the privacy concerns, which almost block out the sun, it’s also the question of how much time I can take from my life to observe yours.

I don’t think the idea of a Facebook will die. But as it continues to pursue profitability by thinking of new ways to deliver consumers to marketers, it will be viewed differently. I think new networks will come along that will offer less — and to me, that will be more.

I have recommended a few people, most spontaneously, just because it’s fun to get to tell others how great you think someone else is. I have also been asked for a recommendation, and was pleased to provide it, kind of kicking myself that I hadn’t thought of it first.

So why does asking for recommendation for myself feel awkward? LinkedIn makes it easy, after all, providing the message and everything. Is it because it looks like, “You say something nice about me and I’ll say something nice about you?” Or does it? And how much value do such recommendations have anyway? Are they worth all this soul-searching?

Let me know what you think.

One of the concepts introduced during the 60SecondMarketer’s online social media roundtable I recently attended was the Gartner Hype Cycle. Developed by Gartner Research for nearly every industry, the hype cycle helps marketers decide where a technology falls in its lifespan and time their efforts accordingly. There are five phases:

Technology Trigger: A potential technology breakthrough kicks things off. Early proof-of-concept stories and media interest trigger significant publicity. Often no usable products exist and commercial viability is unproven.

Peak of Inflated Expectations: Early publicity produces a number of success stories—often accompanied by scores of failures. Some companies take action; many do not.

Trough of Disillusionment: Interest wanes as experiments and implementations fail to deliver. Producers of the technology shake out or fail. Investments continue only if the surviving providers improve their products to the satisfaction of early adopters.

Slope of Enlightenment: More instances of how the technology can benefit the enterprise start to crystallize and become more widely understood. Second- and third-generation products appear from technology providers. More enterprises fund pilots; conservative companies remain cautious.

Plateau of Productivity: Mainstream adoption starts to take off. Criteria for assessing provider viability are more clearly defined. The technology’s broad market applicability and relevance are clearly paying off.

Anyone paying the slightest bit of attention lately would agree that social media networking is solidly atop the peak of expectations, and headed into the trough of disappointment. Taking the long view, though, and paying attention to the hype cycle, we know the ride will get smoother.

For those who worry they will miss the social media boat if they don’t act immediately, the good news is there’s plenty of time. Most applications like Facebook and Twitter, if they continue to provide worth, will likely make it through to the plateau of productivity. Some would argue they already have.

“Studies have shown that 1) ad recall is at an all time low, 2) banner ad click-through rates are usually rounding-errors to zero – i.e., very, very low, and 3) consumers’ eyes avoid the top and right of Web pages because they know that’s where ads are typically placed.”

These three facts (which I haven’t checked independently but which sound right) total one thing: the human mind can only take in so much and after a point, adapts by efficiently filtering out the surplus, or in the case of advertising, what is referred to as “clutter.”

It’s like driving. If you registered every single detail as you moved across the landscape, it would be impossible to proceed. To survive, we assign categories of importance to the things around us: pedestrians and bicyclists in the road are number one, other cars are number two, red lights and stop signs are number three…and so on. If we allowed billboards to be number one, we’d have a lot more wrecks.

Of course we already know this. What we don’t always know, and continue to try to crack, is how to be the one message that breaks through. And since our desire for products, services, ideas, candidates, etc. is as complicated as a busy street, there are no blanket answers to that.