Dowd Dead On

Maureen Dowd's column today on Ad-land is excellent and exactly right. Advertisers and marketers are still wedded to an idea of branding that says get 'em early and they'll stay brand loyal for life. Thus they advertise what teen-agers call "brown soda" to teen-agers who don't like, don't drink and don't want "brown soda." And they never will.

The best line in the column is this: "Advertisers, as Fred Brock wrote in The Times, 'have become a bunch of anti-Willie Suttons, aiming where the money increasingly isn't.'" Bulls-eye.