Optimism and How To Profit From It

NewAdvertising writes the following about the new Pepsi campaign:

All this is carried out with relentless optimism for the future...aimed squarely at the Optimistic Millenials identified by the Pepsi Optimism Project. They're the generation that, whenever we do research with them, expresses an enormous longing for the optimism of the sixties.They envy the generation's protest, music, dress, sexual mores and so much more. They believe they missed a critical period in relatively recent history. See a earlier blog post from The New Advertising on the 60's & 70's generation vs Pepsi's New Millennials.

So, if you are corporate America looking at this information, what do you do with it? Work toward leading a country toward a more just, less fascist, more creative, compassionate society?

Uh, yeah right.

Tom Waits once said he never licensed his songs for commercial use because Corporate America would strip out the message and attach the meaning to the sale of a product; buy this thing, attain the feeling that the song originally evoked. And that is precisely Pepsi's plan:

So it's no surprise that the look of both the site and the video is 60's pop-art-like. Just take a look at Roy Lichenstein 1962 painting "Art" ...

When we look at the damage that capitalism causes, it can really be reduced to a simple idea that everything - everything - has a monetary value and no value otherwise.