Episode description

Simone Pond (advertising executive, author andblogger) is our featured guest.

Topic: Trends in The Advertising Industry.

Specific items discussed: The TV show Mad Men; the power of viral videos; the public backlash against giant digital billboards; the rise of human billboards; the continuing decline of newspapers; the recent loss of schmoozing; the shrinking number of advertisers willing to commit to three or five year advertising contracts; the overwhelming migration of advertisements from all traditional forms of media to the Internet; (because of) the astounding targetability of Internet ads. Simone also describes some of the ways advertising has earned its reputation for evil manipulation. I tried to defend advertising, but she insists that everytime she comes home from her advertising job she feels unclean. She quotes Sean Connery from the movie The Anderson Tapes. "What is advertising but a legalized con game?"

Simone Pond is an advertising executive with a Los Angeles advertising agency. She graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park with a B.A. in Communications and a minor in English. She is also the author of two novels which are set three hundred years in the future: The City Center, and its sequel: The New Agenda.

Hosted by Stephen Euin Cobb, this is the May 28, 2014 episode of The Future And You. [Running time: 34 minutes] This interview was recorded using Skype on May 1, 2014.

Stephen Euin Cobb is an author, futurist, magazine writer and host of the award-winning podcast The Future And You. A contributing editor for Space and Time Magazine; he has also been a regular contributor for Robot, H+, Grim Couture and Port Iris magazines; and he spent three years as a columnist and contributing editor for Jim Baen's Universe Magazine. He is an artist, essayist, game designer, transhumanist, and is on the Advisory Board of The Lifeboat Foundation. Stephen is the author of Indistinguishable from Magic: Predictions of Revolutionary Future Science as well as A Brief History of Predicting the Future.