Mown

I'm behind in my gardening. I've really enjoyed Scot Covey's thoughtful and thought-provoking series of articles on grassroots marketing. As an employee of a Twin Cities radio station, I, too, have a complicated relationship with marketing and can assure you that every strategy meeting is larded with one or more of the following phrases: grassroots, social media, consumer-driven, interactive. These phrases are served up earnestly, accompanied by earnest little erections. There are good things to be said about advertising and marketing, but who cares? I'm behind in my gardening. The danger in marketing, as Mr. Covey indicates, is that it doesn't matter in any meaningful way whether the message being conveyed is true or not. Companies big and small spend lots of money on marketing campaigns meant to convince you that they care about what you think. They don't. In fact, the more successful they are at making you think they care about what you think, the less they have to think about what you think. (If you're feeling a little too rosy about the world, take a few minutes to look up BP's finances for the last few years—profits versus expenditures on advertising, branding, lobbying, actual efforts to move "beyond petroleum," partnerships with environmental groups, etc.) Art, on the other oil-soaked flipper, is a search for truth—something true and lasting about what it means to be a human being alive in the universe. We struggle to bring a little clarity to the world. Marketing adds to the confusion, which, if it were up to me, would land you a place in Dante's Inferno right next to those who betray a sacred trust. Just as one example, consider the ways in which marketing debases language: the king of beers, the best a man can get, the human network, the choice of a new generation, moving forward, I'm lovin' it. We have all grown up surrounded by advertising and learned at a very early age that words like these are not meant to be taken literally. Indeed, they have very little meaning at all—merely a pleasant resonance that is meant to reflect positively on a product or service. I write commercials each week that promise the "hottest deals," "best service," "lowest prices," and so on, thereby assuring myself the "hottest seat" in Hell. Compare that to the care with which any decent playwright chooses the words she gives to her characters. I'm behind in my gardening, but managed to spend about six hours last weekend pruning, weeding, and mulching. Although the garden is separated from the lawn by broad, flat paving stones, I spend hours each summer pulling grass out of the hostas, irises, and herb beds. The grass roots run undetected for several inches before sending hardy shoots up among the asters. See, I had a point. The original meaning of a "grassroots" campaign was something spontaneous, largely unnoticed until established and then hard to eradicate. So the idea of companies manufacturing their own "grassroots" advertising campaigns is one more example of how marketing strips meaning from language. By all means, do whatever you can to market your work. I wish you the best of luck. But in the spirit of the original meaning of "grassroots," maybe we should all do a little spontaneous marketing for organizations that we have nothing to do with. I'll start. I have never worked with, nor have any real connection to these companies, but have enjoyed their work when I've seen it: Four Humors Theater, The Jungle Theater, Mu Performing Arts, Walking Shadow. Your turn. See you in hell!