A smart arse in a dumb shirt

I just had a bunch of t-shirts made up that say ‘I am not part of your target demographic’. I did this because while I usually find those kinds of shirts irritating on other people, for some reason they make me feel like less, not more, of a tool.

The other thing about them is, when one goes to the gym, fit young people tend to come up and say hello, how about that t-shirt you’re wearing. (Other favourites include ‘I hate your band’ and ‘Your product here’).

Anyway, this post isn’t really about all of that. It is more like an open letter to the Public Relations Industry:

Dear Public Relations Industry,

I believe I can save you a lot of time, and generate some positive vertically integrated efficiencies, by telling how it is that the Young People think about the politicians. The truth is that the average young person regards your standard Aussie pollie with a mixture of indifference and disdain, and more importantly as some kind of manifestation of a hyperaggressive media. John Howard? My gosh, he’s on TV a lot. Just like Anna Coren and those Hollywood starlets. Kevin Rudd? Isn’t he that guy with the MySpace page? God, how frightful it is to actually be asked one’s opinion on something like that … usually when the baby boomers & poll wizards want to get some ‘qualitative data’ about said individuals.

Acutally, the funniest thing I’ve read recently was a short article in the Daily Telegraph about some internal polling that Crosby Textor had done on Christopher Pyne, Tony Abbott, and the pharmaceutical and medical insurance industries. While the latter could be expected to be pretty much universally despised, they actually scored a lot better than the two minister. If you don’t find this funny I don’t know and can’t even tell you why you’ve read this far.

The actual thing about opinion poll data is that, as far as predicting outcomes of election goes, it is about half as reliable as seeing what the bookmakers are giving. There have been serious studies done on this, and if the information were more well known it would have to be suppressed … so my suggestion to you, PR Industry, is to maybe combine the most Satanic of your Dark Arts with the methods employed by the gambling industry.

Aside from the dangers of this combination bringing about the Rapture, there could be some opportunities here to leverage … oh, what the f*ck.

yours,

Evan