I’ve always found it interesting to watch trends, especially as they pertain to marketing. With the coming Great Depression II, the Sequel current economic downturn, it’s fascinating to me, to see the bottom-feeders coming out of the woodwork, to market their wares to a shellshocked public. Case-in-point…

AshleyMadison.com. Seen their commercials? They run on FoxNews a bunch at night, and barely made a dent in my psyche the first 100 or so times they ran. For some reason, I actually paid attention one night (I suspect it was because I was watching live TV instead of Tivo-ing through the commercials). Ashley Madison is a dating service. For married people. To help them cheat on their spouses. Discreetly.

Um…yeah. Now THERE’S a helpful service.

Apparently, when the economy tanks, it puts a stress on marriages. Some people don’t have the money to get divorced. (Of course, if that’s true, do they have the money to cheat?) Nonetheless, Ashley Madison exists to make it easier, I presume, to cheat and not get caught.

Lately, most of the trickle spam that does make it through my email defenses is not about Viagra or Extendz, but about helpful services that will assist you with your very own divorce. If I ever do face divorce – God forbid – the last bloody place I’ll look for help will be a Spammer, thank you very much.

Then there’s the explosion in Credit Re-Fi services. “Can’t pay your bills? We can help!” Uh…sure they can. Not that they can do anything that you, yourself can’t do with a phone, your creditor’s numbers, and half a brain (hint: call them and negotiate a better deal), but why give away the plot?

Let’s not leave the real ambulance chasers out of the ambulance chasing hall of shame, either. You can’t go a commercial break without seeing some law firm asking you if you’ve gotten so much as a hangnail from an improperly designed 3-ring notebook, before you’re admonished to call Dewey, Cheatam, and Howe to get your day in court.

Maybe we should all just take a step back, or as I used to tell my daughter when she was little, Slow down, calm down, and THINK about it. There are no quick fixes to getting out of this financial mess. Neither adultery, divorce, credit repair, nor bankruptcy offer a painless way out for most of us. (And of course “painless” is the goal here for our Instant Gratification society.) Perhaps if we just all realize we’re all in this together, and decide to take a little personal responsibility, suck it up, Cowboy/girl Up, grit our teeth and get to work, we can get out of this mess. Take it from me, as long as we have a government that is determined to try and spend our way out of the financial hole we’ve dug as a Nation, we’re gonna need all the gumption we can get.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 7:53 pm and is filed under marketing.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.