With people more and more saturated with advertising messages that scream about lifestyle and how to be cool, it’s actually refreshing to run into an ad that looks as though it belongs on Saturday Night Live but that is taking itself completely “seriously.” I think the manufacturers know that they could have just released a square cube with a strap on it and called it Seatbelt Relief, and that the Tiddy Bear was clearly a better strategy. It’s a brilliant strategy, in fact, because in an attention economy, it’s something that will get people talking and in the meantime, they’ll sell a few since it solves an albeit trivial need. It’s still a little frustrating (to me anyway) that we’re still a culture not above manufacturing products that have two and three year lifespans as products and decades long lifespans as garbage, but whatever; I still think we’ll get there. Asking for a totally sustainable product lifecycle for the Tiddy Bear just sounds silly, doesn’t it?

Chris Anderson makes the excellent point that the people complaining about intellectual property being treated as free are missing the fact that free does not equal valueless. I’ll agree with him there. But a simple economic fact that IP-based companies and industries are going to have to wake up to is that markets operate because of scarce resources. According to most neoinstitutional economic thought, people trade because what the other person has is of more value. In a nutshell, If I farm celery and you farm tomatoes, we’ll trade because each of our goods is more valuable to the other person. But there are two things under the sun that I can think of that are not (effectively) scarce resources on this planet. One is sunlight and the other is brains (and with them, ideas).