Punk is…
Saying something in a meeting at work that jars the groupthink away from the safe, tried and trusted routes.

Punk is…
Introducing some managed chaos into the workplace to unshackle people’s thinking and inject some creativity.

Punk is…
Taking a day out of the office to do something completely different but stimulating – an art gallery, a movie, a hike - and letting your mind make the creative connections necessary to tackling problems in new ways.

Punk is…
Bringing in an expert from a completely different field – a cabinetmaker, a tree surgeon or sushi chef, for instance – to talk to your team and learn from the experience.

Punk is…
Hiring people not based on the amount of relevant experience they have in your industry but on how the unique skills they have will help the organization grow.

Punk is…
Making creativity a part of everyone’s jobs, not just the domain of a department in an agency, and judging employee performance partly based on how well they’ve used creativity to solve problems.

Punk is…
Putting yourself in others’ shoes to see in a more objective way if what you’re doing makes sense to the outside world or whether you’re just talking to yourself.

Punk is…
Being a greedy consumer of knowledge from all sources, and discovering ways to apply that information to your own business when you least expect it.

Punk is…
Finding ways to be happy in your work, knowing that happiness is good for creativity and creativity is good for more creativity, which is good for business, which makes you happy.

Punk is…
Knowing that if what you do doesn’t pass the bullshit test and isn’t meaningful, honest and interesting, you should be doing something else instead.

Punk is…
Realizing that people don’t care about your business and certainly not your marketing unless you give them a serious, no bullshit reason to care.

Punk is…
Setting impossibly high goals for yourself and thinking of crazy ways to get there before scaling back your ambitions to more achievable ones, as this will free your mind to bigger possibilities.

Punk is….
Questioning colleagues on their assumptions, and never accepting any form of the “it’s how we’ve done it before” rationale.

And that is what Punk is, dude.

Twitter @laermer

This is exactly the kind of thing authors of the unbearably famous Bad Pitch Blog tell those PR practitioners unlucky enough to see their latest debauchery end up on badpitch.blogspot.com.

For several years now, PR pros Richard Laermer (@laermer) and Kevin Dugan (@prblog) have joined forces to write the award winning industry watchdog blog, and now they are hosting their first live teleseminar. And everyone is invited.

Mark your calendars for Wednesday, July 29 from 1 p.m. to 2 p.m. EDT. PR know-it-alls Richard Laermer (Punk Marketing, Full Frontal PR) and Kevin Dugan (Strategic PR Blog) are hosting the brand new “Bad Pitch Night School (During The Day).”

Admission gets you:

• A smart, step by step approach to pitching that includes hilarious case studies and goes beyond that simple email. From looking at the whole pitch lifecycle, including the truth about pitching bloggers and using social media, to tips that will no doubt make you better-informed (and tell you how) plus the keys to pitch inspiration, they’ll help you improve your game.
• Plus, a free e-book of Laermer`s classic Full Frontal PR handbook.

In this nonstop, ridiculously cool hour the boys are going to knock you out with more learning than you thought possible!

$49 bucks gets you admission for as many people as you can cram into a conference room (via speakerphone, natch), and your free e-book. What a deal!

There’s a Bad Pitch Blog Scholarship Program! What would a school (and a recession) be without scholarships? Bad Pitch Blog gives out five FREE student scholarships and five FREE professional scholarships to those professionals “between jobs/in transition/laid off/out of work.” If you qualify write the boys at badpitch@gmail.com Do it now. Time is fleeting.

Learn more, sign up and be cool at www.CrappyPR.com. Oh and laugh a bit.

Enjoy. Comments? Twitter us at www.Twitter.com/punkmarketing.

Hey Kids: For Immediate Release

–Now in Paperback–

Ever hear of WIMPLASH? Every economic indicator is moving in the wrong direction and the outlook seems grim. Instead of throwing themselves into the fight, marketers are suffering from what Punk Marketing’s Laermer and Simmons call “wimplash,” the inability to move up, down or sideways. So Punk Marketing is back and better than ever.

The paperback Punk Marketing—in stores and on street corners May 19—is peppered with examples, case studies, faux pas, jokes, and practical advice that every marketer needs right now. A recession provides a momentous opportunity for anyone selling ANYTHING to use whatever budgets they have intelligently. The faint-hearted will retreat to traditional while the wise engage consumers by recognizing a shift in power from corporations to consumers.

Laermer and Simmons, the established, unstoppable authors of PUNK MARKETING: Get Off Your Ass and Join the Revolution (Harper Paperbacks; May 2009; $16.99, trade paperback), are anxious to have their message heard. They write, “More and more and even more consumers are now not consumers but content creators and distributors of really good material too.” As consumers become less passive, traditional marketing campaigns are obsolete.

According to these dudes, snappy TV ads that used to sell products effectively are not potent during a crazy time like this. A myriad of social networking sites, video on and offline, below-the-radar sites, DVR action, teensy pamphlets and fliers, mobile meandering and whole mass of entertainment options have segmented the viewing audience. For companies to promote their products, they must target consumers accurately and work with them to serve their needs.

The book that critics called “blunt, fair, fearless and outrageous—just like the marketing style they espouse” gets its groove on by discussing organizations that have been successful by reaching out to their core demographic in new ways. The authors lift their hands and shout—err, write: “Consumers want to feel the company they buy from has their absolute best interests at heart; so for them that means being treated respectfully as sole beings and not units in some amorphus lump.”

In addition to some of the Punk approaches marketers are now taking, technology has revolutionized marketing. Smart marketers are finding ways to successfully reach consumers via text messages about exciting deals. RFID technology may some day enable a shop to tailor their product offerings to the personal dialections of the consumers. “One of your authors, a professional futurist/show-off, once envisioned a time when you or we can walk by a shop and a special discount or menu would pop onto our teensy screens,” Laermer and Simmons write.

Called a “Book You Should Have Read” by Advertising Age last year, the updated, PUNK MARKETING introduces a radical new approach and a new lexicon to a discipline desperately in need of an overhaul. Founded upon a 100% revised set of assumptions about how consumers interact with brands, it is more than theoretical analysis; it is a set of usable (and funny, and arguable) tools for the modern marketing revolutionary.

According to Laermer and Simmons, it’s high time for marketers to recognize this and change their Fail-oriented ways before the guy or gal who replaces them does it for them.


About the authors:

Richard Laermer is a top trends and marketing speaker, author of the best-selling book Full Frontal PR and the brand new 2011: Trendspotting for the Next Decade, as well as the CEO of veteran agency RLM PR. He is known for his Marketplace commentaries on NPR, hosted the cult makeover series Taking Care of Business on The Learning Channel and is a frequent commentator on CNNMoney.com while co-managing the BadPitchBlog (badrelease.com) for the PR industry! He is also a regular writer for HuffingtonPost (www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-laermer) and helms the new teaching site, HowToFame.com, launching in June.

Mark Simmons has 20 years of experience as a top marketer in the US and his native England , and has been at the topmost edge of new techniques while running his own Anti-Corp agency and as the LA head of groundbreaking bad boy agency Crispin, Porter & Bogusky. Simmons recently launched social enterprise USELESS, dedicated to helping people use less while giving more. He is a full-time rock star marketing consultant toiling for, among others, Gore and Gates, which has brought the planet further from extinction. Prior to all this good, he was one of the top marketers at Coca-Cola in Atlanta. 

About the book
Title: PUNK MARKETING: Get Off Your Ass and Join the Revolution
Author: Richard Laermer and Mark Simmons
On sale date: May 19, 2009
Price: $16.99, trade paperback
Pages: 256
ISBN: 978-0-06-115111-8
Imprint: Harper Paperbacks

Contact:
Barbara Teszler
212.207.7727
barbara.teszler@harpercollins.com

Twitter wasn’t Evan’s first breakthrough product. In 1999 he had started a company called Pyra and, while working on a project management web application as a way to keep track of the project, the team wrote script to turn a personal website into a blog, which eventually turned into Blogger. “It wasn’t at all what our company was planning go do, it was very much just an idea on the side which seemed like a very small idea compared to what we were working on.” They basically just stumbled on the idea behind Blogger.

Evan says that his co-developers had more discipline than he did so wanted to focus on the original product, but he couldn’t bring himself to drop it. “I just couldn’t get rid of the Blogger idea, it kept nagging me,” he says. And he eventually convinced his co-developers to build it on the side. But, “it turned out to be more interesting than then original plan” and Blogger started getting some traction, so eventually they shut down the original project to focus on it. Blogger became very successful and Evan and his partners sold their company, Pyra, together with Blogger for an ‘undisclosed sum’ to Google in February 2003.

With Twitter, Evan says it was similar in some ways, but different in many others. By that time he’d left Google and started a new company, called Obvious, to develop ideas. He called it ‘obvious’ because, he says, often after an idea has been developed other people will say, that it was “obvious” from the start. Compared to Pura, “we were further along with the company,” he says. “We had raised venture capital and were about a year into the company. We were more like 14 people instead of 3. We were focusing on a podcasting product that wasn’t really taking off and so were actively looking for new ideas.” And Twitter was one of the ideas they came up with.

But, why did he think it was a good idea?

It’s not as if there weren’t enough ways to communicate with friends when Twitter was conceived (it was launched in March 2006) - blogs, email, IM, phone…even F2F (’face-to-face’ in Internet jargon). “I don’t know,” says Evan. “A lot of it, for me anyway was gut.” He’d seen how people had used Blogger and saw the similarities with Twitter, and he saw its potential. “Once we had the prototype and were using it ourselves, then it was very clear it was interesting. It was immediately compelling to the small group of us using it.”

But, Twitter didn’t take off overnight. In fact, despite the success of Blogger, he knew Twitter would difficult to explain to the finance folks. He didn’t try to convince the the original investors in his new company of the value of Twitter and eventually he bought the company back from them. “It would have been a tough sell,” admits Evan.

Since its launch three years ago, how people use Twitter has evolved. “It’s changed quite a bit in the ways people use from what we originally imagined,” he says. “It’s continually surprising. Even though we have had the notion for a while that Twitter has the potential to be very big, it’s the way it’s grown and the different uses and the reality of it becoming big in so many different ways is always surprising.” When he first used it he took it much literally, ‘what are you doing?’ to update friends. It’s now become much broader than that. People have learned “It’s just a way to communicate something to a bunch of people at once.” It’s now become a way to find out what’s happening with the things people care about - whether friends, news, events, a band, a sports team.

(Of course Facebook has it’s own ‘what are you doing now?’ feature, but Evan thinks that people use it very differently to how people use Twitter because Facebook is for people in their social circle, wheras Twitter doesn’t have to be.)

He thinks media usage will continue to evolve and before long other things will come along that’ll make Twitter look pretty primitive. But, certain new patterns in media have now started to stabilize. For instance, the reverse chronology time-line (most recent stuff first) seen on blog posts (like this one) is now how people consume media, whereas not too long ago it was a novelty. And, “one that will be obvious to everyone soon is that all media is social media. There will be very few examples of media that stands alone and don’t have commentary from other people.” A positive thing about media, he believes, is that people question its credibility a lot more now than they used to, and media sources - bloggers, twitterers - will get a reputation for being credible when, and if, other people say they are credible.

Obvious doesn’t exist as a company any more, it’s all about Twitter. The plan had originally been to develop more products like Twitter and spin them off into their own companies. “In the case of Blogger and Twitter the ideas that became interesting were not the ideas the companies were founded for,” he says. The most interesting ideas are often hard to fund at first because they are so new. Most times, he says, it’s almost impossible to start something on the side (like he did, twice), you just say, “I can’t do that.” So, he “wanted to create environment to pursue those sort of ideas and where it would also be okay if they didn’t work” - the ideas that exist somewhere between hobbies and ones needing venture capital money.

While the theory behind Obvious is sound, “in practice it didn’t really get off the ground,” he says. “Twitter was getting to the point where it deserved to be its own company. I found myself gravitating towards Twitter and I didn’t know if I wanted to be in a mode where I was switching my focus so much. Multiple times a day I was switching projects and I found, for myself, that way of working didn’t work at all. I came to the conclusion it was better to do one really big thing than lots of small or medium things, and there was nothing that I could think of that was potentially as big as Twitter.” So, Evan is not even thinking beyond Twitter now.” Twitter’s the biggest possible thing I could do,” he says.

I asked him about his creativity. “I’ve always thought of myself as very creative. I’m not a ‘wacky’ creative, I’m more of an innovator and I see potential in things and I see opportunities and I’m good at synthesizing ideas.” He’s very clear that he didn’t invent Twitter, but he did see what it could become. “I’m good at recognizing new ideas when often the people who came up with them don’t recognize them themselves that they’re good ideas.” His skill is partly in “questioning assumptions, which I think is a core thing in creativity. I’m continually asking ‘are we thinking big enough?’ and pushing the team towards not just solving the problem we have today, but thinking much bigger, thinking ‘well, why are we stopping there?’”

And, when it comes to innovation, he is more of a doer than a talker. “I’m a big believer in just trying stuff,” he says. “I don’t want to debate too much whether or not something’s a good idea until we see it in action.” This is possible with web applications in particular where it’s often just as easy to try it out as talk about it. “The Achilles heal of successful products and even companies is that success locks you into a certain mode and it allows the upstarts to come in and try something completely different, or just different enough to be superior.”

During his time working for Google Inc., despite its reputation as one of the most innovative companies around, he saw a lot of projects not able to get off the ground because Google were focused on much more important incremental improvements. “You have to accept a certain amount of discomfort if you think there’s a better way to go.” At Google they use endless amounts of data to make the decisions and are constantly testing new things on a very small percentage of users and seeing their reaction. But, there are many innovations for which that process doesn’t really work, where numbers don’t necessarily tell you the story. “Sometimes you just have to go with your gut,” says Evan.

Talking of his own background, he says, “I definitely think people can learn how to ‘do’ creativity, but I think for the most part people ‘unlearn’ how to do it. At grade school my parents were told by my teachers I would come up with the right answers, but the wrong way. Even if I knew the answer I didn’t want to get to it the way they wanted me to get to it.” He strongly believes that creativity is often beaten out of kids at school, it’s about coming to the same conclusions as everybody else.

He rejected that philosophy, but rebelled in a quite way by throwing his energy into changing the status quo through technology. “It was a nerdy form of rebellion,” he says.

“I read your book and I think you are great crazy. I want to be your disciple and preach your word to the common people. forgiveness for my English”

Javier, we love being great crazy and are glad you want to join us. Any other takers?

You don’t need to be told that we are in the depths of a steep recession. Jobless claims are up, GNP is down, and most importantly for marketers, ad spends are projected to fall a whopping four percent this year. Trust in corporate America is non-existent. Things are bleak.

It is easy to curl into to the fetal position and wait out the warmer economic days, but if you do that, you are missing out! You see, friends, Recession actually *creates* opportunity. When there is less money, marketers have license to be more creative. The people who are scared will retreat into the traditional, boring methods of marketing – another billboard? now? - while those who think outside the bun a little bit will have the chance to be creative and thrive.

Sounds easy, but at this point you’re probably wondering how you can be part of the “in crowd” who makes a buck during the downturn. Let the gentlemen from Punk Marketing give you some tips. Key is to keep a few straightforward concepts in mind and the rest will take care of itself…with finesse and vigor!

First, you have to realize that consumers – not the media or marketers - control the market. What do consumers want? They want you to be there for them. They want to know they are buying a good product. Consumers want you to hold their hands and show them what to buy. They want to feel like they are part of American-led innovations.

Example: A recent Brooks Brothers ad entitled Generations of Style may as well have been clipped from a 1949 life magazine. the message: “We are an American institution, it’s OK to buy from us!”

Once you’ve determined the right angle with which to position your product, remember that marketing in 2009 is like war, but less bloody. We are fighting people who never want to leave their homes, and when we capture them, we shower them with love. After you get consumers to consume, you must reward them for taking the plunge. Reassurance is one of the big changes that needs to be made to adjust.

OK – you know how to position your product, you know how to treat your customers after you get them to buy, but how about the actual marketing?

Simply put: Tone is more important than ever. Your message is meaningless today if you say it with the wrong tone. Your messages should be WARM in the cold recession. Fill people with warmth. People need to feel good about what they are buying, not just adequate.

Take for example, the latest Crown Royal TV spot – the typical alpha male pool shark wins every game at the pub, but leaves early every night to shoot a game or two with his dad, while enjoying Crown Royal. Isn’t that precious? Kind of makes me want to spend $35 on a fifth of bourbon, just to feel better.

Beyond the message and its position and tone, there is a very practical aspect of selling that many marketers completely miss: focus groups do not represent your customers. Your customers represent your customers. Listen to them! Do not make your customers feel stupid by telling them what research presumes they are thinking! Original Punk Marketer Henry Ford once famously said that if he listened to what his customers thought they wanted, they would have said “a faster horse.”

Your message should be crafted in a way that provides people with the idea that they are getting something of value when they purchase your product instead of just a low price. Cheap is what chickens do! People want to feel like they are getting a deal on something that costs a little more.

Nissan’s latest move is an excellent illustration of this. It started selling a $12,000 car — the Nissan Versa — for just under $10,000. All of the sudden, car buyers were getting a deal – a brand new car for below the psychological barrier of a five digit price. Excellent move, Nissan.

The line between low-cost and value is often precarious, and complicated even further by the fact that in a recession, consumers do not want to spend large amounts of money. Big ticket items are no longer the big sellers. Huge capital outlays are for the birds. You need to pick and choose what kinds of products fit the bill: Instead of selling that 52” plasma, how about selling a Blu-ray disc with a pack of microwave popcorn?

Just as consumer spending is principled these days, all recession marketing must be similarly principled. Stick to your customers like your job depends on it, because it does. Now is perhaps not the best time to be over-aggressively pursuing new customers. You need to hang on to your existing customers. They already love you with their wallets!

Creativity plays a big part of the successful recession marketer’s arsenal. There are a few sources of media left that consumers actually listen to. The Internet is one. This is, remember, 2009. There is no excuse for dismissing the online world as fringe. Start using some 2009 methods to get the message out. Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook, Wikipedia, Ning sites, etc. are your friends - these are not cliches in any way. Using them is no longer optional – it is compulsory. Everybody uses a computer now. Don’t you think you ought to start? everyone and their mother is carrying an iPhone or a Blackberry these days – isn’t it about time you figured out how to get to them via their mobile device?

Along with a solid, disciplined message, consumers want clear and concise choices. Don’t confuse them with options and bells and whistles. Be one thing – one really great thing. Tylenol sells no less than 14 kinds of sinus medication. Don’t make your buyers have to become experts on the ins and outs of your product. Hit them over the head with focused and deft marketing, and the rest will take care of itself.

The well-informed, principled, disciplined, and savvy marketer must always keep in mind that marketing is not always the most important thing that your company has in mind. You absolutely must choose your battles. As a marketer, you aren’t going to get every dollar you want. That’s where that noggin of yours comes into play. Didn’t get the $15,000 you wanted for billboards? No big deal. Think up something better to use in hopes that you get the $2,000 for AdWords on a great and unexpected content site. Money is finite – and companies aren’t likely to give you all the dollars you need. Don’t let that be an excuse for running yet another lame radio ad, ok?

Look, friend. Things are bad, no doubt. Chances are they are going to get bad before they get better. This is where you earn your stripes as a marketing pro. Stick to what we know works well and ride out this downturn. This can be your time to shine — if you choose to make it your time to shine.

Punk Marketing on Twitter: www.twitter.com/punkmarketing (duh); paperback Punk Marketing on 5/15.

• Your “Smart Home” crashes and won’t let you in?
• Your toaster can’t find the software to toast your bread?
• You can’t multitask in your home- because if you use the washer, dryer, TVs, hair dryers, computers, printer, fax at the same time-because your house will slow down or freeze and have to be constantly rebooted?
• You haven’t upgraded your home to Windows Latest Crap and so the home can’t open up any of your windows? Wouldn’t that suck!
• Your home has to do time for “performing an illegal operation” and thanks to these occurring you constantly have no place to live?
• Your washing machine loses more than stray socks since you didn’t press the SAVE function?
• Your kid didn’t do as well on the college boards as your “Smart Home,” and your home got into a better college?
• Your “Smart Home” lost all of its smart data and became silly since you didn’t backup?
• You have to take courses every time your home has to be upgraded –formerly remodeled or repaired – if you didn’t upgrade, you can’t get replacement parts for your home or appliances?
• Your voice activated smart-pants home understands your “Honey, I’m home” command as “Honey, I’m a burglar,” and phones the cops cause it doesn’t believe you’re that honey. (”Lucy?”)
• It takes your microwave and all of your previously “instant on” electronics and appliances five minutes to recover from a crash?
• Your home flashes an error message, and your home and everything in it disappears because you didn’t save in a new file?
• Your home has obtained a virus and has to be quarantined from other homes?
• You can’t figure out Home’s many-thousand-page operating manual — neither can your kid, oy — and Amazon and all brick and mortar shops are out of “Smart Homes for Dummies?”
• Your one-stop-shopping bill that bundles your energy, cable, phone, and broadband services offers the worst of each service — everything goes out in a storm, service is provided by former cable company technicians, and you get interrupted during dinner constantly about switching to a new provider?
• The nanotechnology security system—which is smaller than a piece of dust — went up your child’s nose but no one knew because it couldn’t be seen and each time he sneezed, your alarm went off?
• Your refrigerator and the items in it and your dishwasher and detergent are communicating more than the — um — spouses?
• Robots can operate everything in your ID-enhanced house and decide human inhabitants aren’t needed because they just make a mess?
• Your “Smart Home” can’t keep pace with the Jones’ homes that are smarter?
• You’re kept on hold with bad music daily trying to reach Tech Service about your home network, which keeps going down? (That music is one of the ways in which the term “bad” reintroduces itself to you while waiting for someone to service you!)

The future is not about living like the Jetsons, and most of the cool stuff coming will be subtler and more seamless than the introduction of a pad that makes your own look schmaltzy. Hug your house.

I find myself smack in a middle of an interesting demographic. My generation didn’t have a letter, but we’re now busy executives, soccer Moms and NASCAR Dads, and the generation that voted George Bush into office not once but twice (bad memories but they’re mine). I’ve gone from being the contemporary of cub reporters and interns to that of managing editors and executive producers. Has my perspective on the marketing businesses changed? You bet.

Here’s some advice for those of you who count us among your (potential) customers.

360-Degree Communication

Contrary to the belief of my younger colleagues, we are early adopters and avid promoters. Gee, kids, we were the ones who moved from eight-tracks to cassettes to CDs to DAT even, in record time. We were watching while MTV played “Video Killed the Radio Star” and CNN aired its first on-air piece about Vernon Jordan’s shooting. We made media lists with rotary (okay, push button) telephones and typewriters (IBM Selectrics…)and actually spoke with colleagues—and subsequently created the ubiquitous electronic communications you all dig. We went from missing telephone calls totally to having machines that answered them, to being available 24/7 with mobiles. That’s why we believe in the value of 360 Degree Communications; we remember when we had to actually work to get information. Now, we want to receive facts and figures—call them stories—from all the sources we worked our whole careers to develop.

Embrace the New, Sure, But Don’t Eschew the Old

Wise men and women will all tell you: reaching influencers effectively often involves a stamp (the United States Postal Service to you scratching you heads). I have a ton of information filed electronically. I also have a filing cabinet meticulously organized with all my notes; I use a fantastic device called a pen for those. I have and hold hard copies from clients, colleagues and people trying to sell me junk. I delete Spam without opening it, yet today received three pieces of junk mail which I in fact opened and read. Before tossing.

The Benefits of Writing Good

This is my soapbox, and I’m proud of it. I work in PR, a communications industry. Much of our communication is written. That means outlines, grammar, and channeling your creativity into materials—pitches, letters, collateral, online communications—that are absolutely in line with your client’s and/or company’s business objectives. PR is not about wild and crazy ideas (although stunts do have a time and a place); PR is about creative ideas that deliver solid business value. Have I made myself clear? Or, clearly?

Search and Then Research

Please try not to make assumptions about a target market of which you are not a member. If you are unsure how your audience views a particular topic or issue, ask. If you live in the Northeast, don’t assume everyone in the South or Midwest is a hick. If you’re in your 20’s and have read this far, don’t think that people twice your age don’t have a clue about pop culture or the Next Big Thing. We saw it coming. That said, at 40 what is important is different from what’s important to 20-somethings, no matter what you do for a living. Learn to embrace differences.

Done with soapbox.

Once you have all that down, remember: we are consumers who drive trends. We’ve been doing so for a long time and don’t plan on stopping. We buy stuff, and our earning and purchasing power seriously matters. We might not be as cool as we were, but darn if we don’t wield more power over the world than we ever did.

And that’s it. I’m stepping off now.

For more on this, get a clean, crisp copy of 2011: Trendspotting
Twitter: @laermer

New Yorkers have always had an interesting relationship with Senator Hillary Clinton. We weren’t quite sure what to make of it when she moved into our state apparently for the sole purpose of running for one of our senate seats, and we really didn’t know what to do with her during the now famous race against Rick Lazio. We do know now - on the eve of 2009 - that for the mostpart, we like Senator Clinton, and that she has done an admirable job in her role. She is battle-hardened enough to satisfy even the gruffest of City dwellers, yet thoughtful enough to be genuine. We wish her well as a member of President Obama’s cabinet.

With Senator Clinton soon to leave the legislative branch, Gov. Patterson has to perform a Constitutionally-mandated duty of choosing the much-discussed newbie. This is an awe-inspiring and worthy task, uh isn’t that right, “Governor F-Word”? One prospective name that seems to be circulating is that of a certain Ms. Kennedy - daughter of the last Obama. While Kennedy certainly meets the legal requirements to become a U.S. Senator, I have to wonder if she is up to the task of being one of New York’s crucial legislators.

New Yorkers (like me since birth) strongly dislike non-authentic types. We don’t do bullshit. If you aren’t going to talk straight, we wish you’d get out of our way. There are millions of people in our state and surely someone will give us what we need. That said, when Ms. Kennedy gave an interview to the New York Times, she repeated the phrase “you know” an astounding 142 times. One hundred and forty two! I mean… Palin may have been a public catastrophe, but she has to be cackling now.

Ms. Kennedy, we don’t know. We want to know what qualifies you to be in the Senate as opposed to, say, a public servant at a lower level. We want to know why the interest to become a political figure? All of the sudden? Why after 50 years of “leave me alone and let me raise my children in peace”-iness. Mostly though, we want to know why you don’t deserve comparisons to our dear friend from Alaska, who was ridiculed even by those who did not doubt her.

Objectively speaking, Mrs. Palin has infinitely more political experience than La Kennedy. Palin has been elected to municipal office and statewide office, no small feats, and was (still is) widely lampooned as “not experienced enough” for a shot at Washington. If she lacks experience, what does Ms. Kennedy have besides the President-Elect’s vote to escape this double-standardized criticism?

Look, Caroline (can we call you Caroline?)-we like Teddy. He’s a good man We loved your Uncle Robert. We adored your dad, and because we, like she, epitomized New York, we were beyond infatuated with your mother. We want to like you. But we’re smart and see through the noise.

Please give us something of substance. And add a decent public speaking course to your resume. Or your argument stops at “Gee, my name is Kennedy… you know?”

Bad news is absolutely everywhere. It is unavoidable. The economy is in shambles, 50 million Americans are without health insurance, unemployment is on the rise in numbers that scare even me, and 43 out of 50 states are now operating on a budget deficit. Meanwhile, some enterprising projects have figured out how to keep their heads above water and even prosper in some cases despite experiencing these bleakest of times by making the (now official) recession seem almost cool.

Kind of.

A great example of the general mopiness of society today is found on television. Maury Povich, the veteran host whose syndicated “talk” show is only slightly less cartoonish than Jerry Springer, has made a living for 10 (!) seasons telling people bad news and reveling in it. People parade onto his stage to be told after a DNA test that they “are NOT the father” or be made aware after a lie detector test that their partner has “cheated with more than 3 women.” (For a fabulous – and farcical – version of this concept, set your DVR to catch the haughty and hilarious The Life and Times of Vivienne Vyle with Jennifer Saunders on The Sundance Channel!)

Anyway, entering its 11th season, Maury is holding steady to decent ratings, even outpacing Martha-lite Rachael in some markets. People are apparently looking for anything showing that someone else is in even worse off than they.

Product marketers are also getting into the act. SC Johnson, A (Really-Large) Family Company, is playing up the economic crisis by advertising its inexpensive line of scented oil candles, Glade, as a fantastic alternative to paying more money for the same great-smelling (?) effect. In an ad now playing everywhere, each time a woman lights an expensive candle, it makes a cash register-like CHA-CHING noise. The implication is “Hey! You’ve got no money. Why are you spending 25 cents every time you light that candle, when you could buy a Glade (or “Glaw-Day” as they lampoon themselves as fancy and French in the ad) for a mere penny?”

Glade is still kind of a crummy product – there is a reason why it is so inexpensive – but $3 and a trip to Target sure beats paying Yankee Candle $25 for the freaking privilege of having my kitchen smell like fresh-baked cookies. (Who doesn’t love fresh baked, right?)

Even in what was once recession-proof New York, the local restaurants and businesses are pushing Recession Specials—as if we need a reminder. A popular sandwich shop in Park Slope had a grilled cheese and a cup of soup for four bucks this weekend (it was yummy!). Four bucks is larceny in the trendiest and yuppiest part of Brooklyn! On the last visit, Cookie couldn’t fry the gruyere on organic brioche fast enough.

So, kid, you want to generate some good news? Jump on the bad news wagon cause it certainly won’t be going away anytime soon, despite the overwhelming election of the anti-Bush.

It appears that be you baker, bank, or candle maker, you make people feel like they are saving some dough via your service or product and you’re the best thing since bread or bucks or beeswax, baby.