But with so many people (whether for pay, as a hobby, or both) in all forms of media constantly looking to break news of new product and service developments, the "new product" side of the house isn't the same game anymore. As for spinning the quality and suitability of a product or service for a given customer, that's still important—but again, that omnipresent media is ever more saturated by customer advocates looking to give their opinions and evaluations of those same products. We already know that Crest helps fight cavities, that milk provides calcium, and that Dell will sell you a PC and then answer the phone when you call about it. We get it.

Advertisers of the world, I implore you and urge you: try to tell us something we don't know. Because I'm seeing a distressing trend, and it's at best not terribly convincing and at worst uncompelling and insulting.

Increasingly, advertising seems to be about damage control. I'm not talking about direct, to-the-point damage control, such as doing a reasonably honest job of standing up and taking blame for trouble. In one of the more boring ads aired since the advent of color television, Jacques Nasser, then the CEO of Ford Motor, sat in his office and said he was sorry about the Firestone tire trouble. I'm less troubled by the fact that, clearly, he didn't have much choice left but to take public responsibility than I was at the fact that he wasn't long for the job after that, but that, as they say, is life at the top.

No, I'm referring to banks and phone companies telling us just how much they care not about numbers, but about people. This notion is both fairly easily dispelled if one has ever done business with a bank or phone company, as well as more than a little troubling, since in fact we would like them to care a whole lot about numbers and let us get on with our own personal lives on our own time. As others have done a better job deconstructing the ridiculous Citibank ads than I can in this space, I'll leave it at that.

I'm referring to HMOs advertising the merit and expertise of their nurses. This is fine, until you come to realize that it's not about giving the nurses a pat on the back so much as it is trying to lay the groundwork for customer acceptance of a nurse as a primary care provider, taking those pesky expensive MDs out of the acute (and chronic?) health care process as much as possible. And I'm referring to eBay's "power of all of us" ad campaign, which talks about how wonderful it is that eBay works because, on the whole, everybody's trustworthy. My gut reaction to this campaign was "Huh. eBay must be having a real fraud problem lately."

Advertising at its best is equivalent to one friend telling another how important they are to one another and how there's something that could make the relationship even better. Sadly, faced with all the challenges of marketing in the 21st century, it seems to be devolving into a naughty three year old insisting that absolutely nothing at all is broken in the room they just left.