He was a French Jewish Marxist in the aftermath of World War II, with a vision of utopian communities spread like seashells across the beaches of the world.

But reality has never been kind to the visions of Jewish Marxists, most notably Karl Marx himself.

So Gilbert Trigano’s vision of Paradise, which came to be known as Club Med, has endured a long and tortured history, not unlike God’s vision of Paradise.

It began on the island of Majorca, across the blue water from the smoking ruins of Europe, as a sanctuary for Holocaust survivors. It was a return to the idea of the Noble Savage: an antidote for civilization, as the tagline would eventually promise. A natural Paradise freed from money, clocks, commercialism and all the other impediments to a life of unfettered joy and sensuality, as expounded by visionaries from Rousseau to Hugh Hefner.

Club Med would be Paradise with a French twist. Food would be exquisite. Wine bottles bottomless. And rather than supervised by resort employees, the place would be a crazy summer camp for grownups, run by gentils organisateurs or GO’s. The wild, handsome bunch of counselors and sun-baked adonises famous most especially to a generation of single women in the 70’s and 80’s. This was to be not just a return to primal paradise. This was la vie fou, the crazy life, French-style: sun, sand, and sea mixed with clowns and circuses and costumed folderol and nutty group singalongs.

The payment, of course was luxury. And for a generation or two of young sensual travelers, summer camp with only nature’s amenities was fine. But people grow up, and demand comfort. And those who enjoy sex on the beach eventually have to cope with the results of sex on the beach.

So Club Med began to target families, the first of many marketing evolutions designed to counter-act a long, downward slide. The problem was inherent in the French soul of Club Med. They were very good at la vie fou. They were not so good at la vie commercial. Indifferent to basic customer service, and flabby in their expansion ambitions, they overbuilt with clubs stretching from Vietnam to Bulgaria to Tahiti, and the money losses flowing like wine. More efficient and disciplined “Anglo Saxon” marketers co-opted the concept, and began offering cheap, all-inclusive beach vacations. Club Med’s visionary DNA evaporated when fighting it out on the travel pages in price-off ads. They had become just another resort.

Further compounding the problem was that in the case of the Triganos, the apple fell far from the tree indeed. When Gilbert’s pudgy, laconic son Serge ascended to the reins of the empire, the downhill slide only intensified.

Serge and Club Med became a notorious nemesis to the advertising world, firing their agencies with the insouciance you flick used Gauloises to the gutter. Almost yearly, they would turn a half a dozen more agencies upside down, as ever new teams of desperate advertising people wooed the brand in crazed, uncompensated pitches. I was personally witness to more than one, eventually being on the winning side and having the opportunity to pen their new tagline, of which I am not especially proud: “Club Med. Life as it should be.” At these pitches, Serge Trigano would sit bored and distracted, puffing on a cigar and delivering for the thousandth time the French grimace of boredom and resignation, as if to say: “I have heard it all, and you are telling me nothing new.”

Eventually, the son of the visionary was tossed out on his derriere, and the head of Disney Paris was installed to bring a business rigor to the fading family empire.

Today, the Wall Street Journal reported Club Med losses of $31 million in the first half of this year alone. And a major investor, Bernard Tapie, is carrying on a public feud with Club Med’s chief executive, the son of former French Prime Minister Giscard d’Estaing.

Gilbert Trigano once said: “Deep within us all is a nostalgia for the lost community of our ancestors.”

The nostalgia remains.

In 1968, the established culture packaged and neutered a revolutionary movement known as Hippies. HAIR opened in lower Manhattan, and long-haired freaks were transported off the squalid streets and mattress-clogged floors of the East Village and onto the stage of the Public Theater, singing and dancing.   He who would blunt the ferocity of a social movement would turn it into a Broadway musical.

So, HAIR was a subversive cultural movement tamed into art. But, at the same time, it was a tame art form transformed into explosive art.  Broadway musical theater had never seen the crazy spontaneity of a Happening break the fourth wall of a theater. It had never sung and danced its way through a story without a “book” or logical story line. It had never filled a stage with explosions of four-letter words, unclothed bodies, hallucinations and anti-government slogans. Sociology was tamed, but art was energized.

Now we are forty years on, in the time of another unpopular war, and HAIR has been revived.  And it offers to one-hundred-dollars-a-ticket audiences all the revolutionary fervor of an American Idol show. Meaning, it is an act of cultural karaoke. Breaking fourth walls, sex talk and hints of nudity shock no more. The virulent anti-government rhetoric of the Viet Nam era and any semblance of flag abuse have been carefully scrubbed from the script to guarantee that. And The Hippie, once a walking, talking, drugged-out mockery of bourgeois values, is now a cliché suitable for costume parties, along with pirates and Elvis.

“Look, Maude, look at these wild hippies in the Hirschfeld Theater jumping into the audience and shaking their long hair. Look at the three seconds of nudity. Look at those cute anti-war signs. Look at the hallucinations. Isn’t it cute and zesty?”

HAIR wasn’t cute and zesty when it shattered theatrical convention in 1968.  Hippies weren’t cute and zesty when Rado and Ragni turned them into singing dancing clichés in their iconic show.

Of course, what hippies mostly did while conducting their revolution was smoke cigarettes, take drugs, have sex and listen to records. So maybe permanent enshrinement in Broadway theaters was the least unhealthy fate awaiting them.

Give me a head with hair? Please, take it.

He is the head of General Motors.

He is leading America into “a new economic order, where the bonds of scarcity have been broken, and America is rolling in two-toned splendor to an all- time crest of prosperity.”

This was 1955. Harlow Curtice was head of General Motors and Time magazine’s Man of the Year. The magazine was ebullient. Soon, it gushed, Americans will need to spend “comparatively little time earning a living.”

Well, it is today, and many people actually are “spending comparatively little time earning a living,” But not from the “crest of prosperity” that was promised.

The “two-toned” splendor” of General Motors turned out to be a planned obsolescence in which cars were designed to conveniently break down in three years. It turned out to be a fight to the death against energy standards, a full-scale assault on safety standards, and the destruction of mass transit and trains. It turned out to be about a trillion lousy cars hot off the assembly lines of Michigan.

General Motors went financially bankrupt this week, following a half a century of just about every other kind of bankruptcy. Time magazine isn’t doing too well, either.

The Native American died twice, first by genocide and then by brandcide.

Pontiac is gone. The sinking ship of General Motors threw the old Indian overboard, just weeks after their own Captain Ahab sailed off the deck and disappeared into the briny deep.

The noble savage who represented a purity corrupted by the Puritans was once a proud hood ornament. He cut through wind on America’s back roads and all up and down Eisenhower’s Interstate. On the 1951 Pontiac Chieftan, he actually lit up.

But the Indian was already gone from the hood when Pontiac reached its glory days. DeLorean’s team squeezed an oversized V8 into an undersized car, stole a name from Ferrari and turned Gran Turismo Omologato into GTO, and a rocket for the nuclear family was born.

The muscle car was the last time an emanation from Detroit actually reached the imagination. Wide track, dual exhaust, triple carburetor, it drank gas stations under the table and spoke of a brawny, horse-powered America until a failure of vision and a succession of government mandates sent the muscle car into muscle memory.

Pontiac meant excitement after that. But it was a Pontiac kind of excitement, which meant driving a hundred miles an hour through the trailer park.

There was not much brand left to die, when it finally died.

A brand is a story. Sometimes the brand ends and the story is over, and sometimes the story ends and the brand is over.

As poet Muriel Rukeyser said: “The universe is composed of stories, not atoms.”

Or as Ronny and the Daytonas sang: “C’mon and turn it on, wind it up, blow it out, GTO.”

A brand is a piece of commercial real estate located inside your brain. And scientists just found it!

For the first time, a team of medical and economic researchers used Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) to determine biologically the impact of brands on the human brain. This Brainstorm in Brain Branding known as neuroeconomics was reported by the Wall Street Journal, usually more concerned with economics than neuro. And while the findings may only prove what Grok probably knew instinctively 10,000 years ago in a cave, when he held up a rock and said: “Grok’s rocks. Last longer,” that won’t stop me from reporting this amazing scientific corroboration of the obvious.

The researchers took the brains of twenty highly-educated people and studied the impact of strong brands and weak brands in both high interest and low interest categories: cars and insurance. The MRI was fitted with a video monitor (they’re everywhere these days, aren’t they?), logos were flashed, and brain activity measured.

The result? When strong brand Volkswagen was flashed, a strong pattern of activity was noted in the part of the brain associated with positive emotions, self-identification and rewards. When an unknown car marque flashed, activity was churned up in parts of the brain associated with negative emotions and memory, suggesting the brain had to work for a response.

The surprise came with the low interest category of insurance. A strong brand, European insurer Allianz, produced as powerful a reaction in the brain as Volkswagen. And a weaker brand, Volksfursorge, evoked the same dreary response as the unknown car.

The lesson is irrefutable: a strong brand is a neurological powerhouse operating independent of the product itself. People clearly care more about status symbols like cars and fashion than they do about abstractions like insurance. Yet a strong brand in either category evokes an identical explosion in the nervous system.

So while it’s no surprise your heart beats faster in an Apple store or Ferrari showroom, when you put on a pair of Prada eyeglasses, stroll through Victoria’s Secret, or drink a Coke (which I don’t), apparently the same electricity fires up somewhere in your nervous system when you sign up for Geico insurance (but not Nationwide) or slip into Calvin Klein underwear. (Speaking of which, Calvin Klein’s daughter once said: “Why is it that every time I have sex, I have to read my father’s name.” But I digress).

Interestingly, throughout this exercise in logo-flashing and brain measuring, the decision-making part of the brain was curiously absent. Implying a brand is some evolutionary and neurological shorthand, allowing people to act spontaneously and instantly without having to figure things out.

In advertising, we struggle every day to reach the hearts and minds of consumers. Maybe we should be turning our attention to the synaptic vesicles.

They joined the agency when Madmen was real, the election of John F. Kennedy signaled a new era of hope, and their red, white and blue soda cans took their place on the credenzas of BBD&O, right next to the bourbon.

They left 48 years later, when Madmen was a nostalgic TV show, the election of Barack Obama signaled a new era of hope, advertising’s torturous slide had begun long before the economy in general, and there were hardly credenzas anymore at BBDO, let alone bourbon.

But in between, Pepsi was the Choice of a New Generation.

Of course, new becomes old. Generations de-generate. And choice chooses something else.

So the choice of a new generation, the signature soda pop promoted by the signature pop culture agency, left New York not too long ago and joined a hip younger brother “duding” around in Venice, California: TBWA Chiat Day

BBDO began as Barton, Batten, Durstine & Osborne. A comedian of the time said the name sounded like a suitcase falling down the stairs. Along the way, the name morphed and evolved. They dropped the litany of two-syllabled names born of the Anglo-Saxon Transcendence. Then they lost the ampersand. With its streamlined architecture of anonymous letters BBDO (the voice of a new generation), led by short-of-stature but long-on-influence Phil Dusenberry, they launched Pepsi on the wave of youth culture and high production values.

In a massive and massively expensive insurrection, they laid siege at the barricades of the quintessential American brand: Coca Cola. If Coke was “IT”, well, “IT” meant old. If Coke had a venerated history, it meant Coke was your father’s sugar water. If Coke was as American as mom and front porches, well, that America was gone.

It may never have been formulated this way in the strategic documents of BBDO (or perhaps it was), but the agency sensed that myths were changing.  Norman Rockwell America was passing, being replaced at warp speed by a media-driven, celebrity-obsessed culture.

In other words, adolescent America had won.

Archetypologist Clothaire Rapaille has long described the American cultural unconscious as an adolescent culture, with all the flips and foibles of adolescence: frenetic, attention-deficited, lacking fixed identity, continually seeking re-invention and renewal, devoid of history and tradition. And, because of this lack of self, obsessed with heroes and celebrities.

BBDO rode the youth culture wave, also known as the triumph of adolescent America. There is no history, the brand announced: only now. There is no geography: only a screen. There is no culture: just the ephemera of media-driven images. It was People magazine as brand. It was casting more than creativity. So there was Ray Charles, who of course was eternal. And, MC Hammer: less so. There was Michael Jackson’s hair on fire, probably the least of his problems. Cindy Crawford’s curvature. There was Paula Abdul, prior to her successful revival as a has-been. And Britney…

It is ludicrous, in light of today’s realities. They actually called it, without irony, “The Cola Wars.” But BBDO fought the fight of ephemera valiantly, till the young got older, people got healthier, and the economy got sicker.

Come alive, TBWA. You’re in the Pepsi generation.

Pot, shmott. Anyone who spends half his life swimming back and forth in a chlorinated pool deserves any stimulation or solace he can get.

The issue is: what happens when you hang the sacred hat of your brand on a human being, flawed and imperfect as humans are. And encouraged to be even more flawed and imperfect by being big paid mega dollars for lending their persona to goods and services.

Robert Mapplethorpe

I once worked on a chic, hip little print campaign for Rose’s Lime Juice, a humble old-fashioned drink mixer  marketed to the avant garde art and gay communities. Annie Liebovitz was the photographer. Pairings of interesting creative celebrities were the subject. As the tagline for Roses was The Uncommon Denominator, the idea of the campaign was coupling a traditional, established artist with a young, avant garde figure. One subject was Norman Parkinson, grand old man of the photographic arts who had spent decades photographing both British royalty and the royalty of fashion. His mate in this ad was Robert Mapplethorpe, careerist hero of the gay demimonde who among many other things, was famous for rendering homosexual S & M images in exquisite, almost classical fashion. (I write at length about my experiences and insights into Mapplethorpe in my book The Marketplace of Meanings. Adventures in the hallucination of culture, which you will be hearing about on this website).

So the photographers were photographed by the photographer’s photographer. And all was hip and chic until days after the shoot,  Mapplethorpe announced, tragically, that he had AIDS. Back then, this meant the end. Period. And the client was in the unspeakable position, after all the sympathy was extended and expended, of deciding what to do. Having hung your hat on a celebrity, you have to put on your hard-headed client hat and ask: do I run this ad? Yes, this is beyond commerce, yes, we will not confuse human values with mercenary concerns, yes, this is beyond ads. But…do we run this ad or not? It may seem heartless, but they were confronted with the issue of all the meanings and realities of AIDS being injected into their brand, since a celebrity endorsement is nothing but injecting your brand with the ethos of a particular individual.

In the end, courageously, they ran the ad, and it changed nobody’s life: neither ours, nor Robert’s, nor the brand’s. It even occurs to me that if it happened today, the client might ironically be accused of capitalizing on a fatal disease to sell products. Things have changed.

But as Tom Wicker of the New York Times once said during one of Donald Trump’s periodic rendezvous’ with bankruptcy: “A lot better men than Trump have learned that those who live by PR can die by PR.”

Or, when you hitch your wagon to a star, make sure your star doesn’t fall off the wagon.