Incongruous.

There's a lot of public moaning about the state of the advertising industry. Some of it comes from blogs like this one, or more popular blogs, like Bob Hoffman's, Rich Siegel's, or George Parker's. Some more of it comes from important thinkers like Sir John Hegarty speaking at the Global Marketing Conference in Sydney earlier this week.

I think I can reduce the substance of this moaning, what it's all really about, down to a single sentence or three.

As marketing people we are supposed to avoid jargon. Yet as members of the corporate state, we have to embrace jargon. We have to live within the dominant complacency.

If I were high-falutin, or a sociologist, or a high-falutin' sociologist, this post would be a 40-page monograph called "The Plight of the Individual in the Corporate-ruled World."

It would be about being exhorted to "think outside the box," while we're crammed into cubicles. It would be about being told to "resist the usual" without making waves.

You can't have both. 

You can't have a creative conformity.

You have to choose which is most important to your culture.

And most people have.