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Take that bottled water baby alone. It is still making millions for the big guys. All it took was one small-town screw-up in Walkerton, Ontario and we all dashed for the aquifer and begged every company with a pump to please come bottle our water and sell it back to us. 

Now you can buy plain, straight-from-the-tap water disguised as designer eau de planet with a price tag to match, all packaged in plastics that will spend longer in the landfill than the oil from which they were made. I say we are now ready for the next big breakthrough in manic marketing. We sell air!

We have a chance to nab the niche and make a bundle. It will be good old straight-off- the-back-porch air, and it will be the very stuff we’ve all been breathing since the first smack on the bottom. We just have to stick a cap on a bottle we’ve left out overnight and presto, the rest will be getting it to markets fast enough and banking the booty.

We’ll use the public supply of air and there’ll be no royalty payment the same way water gets bottled from the public aquifer without fees. Oh, and for the snobs we’ll also have “designer” air from the mountains in line with the bottled water in gem-encrusted containers (available @$400 each). There is always the panache of imported product over local supply and people are willing to pay for it, especially if we put some nice outdoorsy graphics on the label.

The demand has already been tweaked by the medical gas suppliers. You’ve noticed those people with a container of gas slung over a shoulder or trundled behind with the little hoses at their noses. They’ll be happy to have everyone else doing the same thing; it’ll take their minds off whatever led them to start using the stuff in the first place. I’m for equal opportunity in this great corporate country of ours, and I say “Why should only the emphysema & lung cancer patients have all the cool accessories?” We might even find some public domain footage of Bhopal to work into a campaign.

And that brings us to the ad campaigns of course. Picture these:

Construction workers sitting around a job site groaning with hangovers, and then

the welders show up, snort some oxygen from their tanks and cavort happily off to

work. They’ve been doing it for years, but now we bring on the hot babe in the

coveralls with a supply of our stuff for the rest of the crew. Hang onto my wrench, wench, and gimme a snort, Mort.

Pan in from treetops swaying in midnight breeze before a full moon to a clip from the movie Blazing Saddles – the beans-n-farts campfire scene – then off to our bottled air with mountain scene on label. The choice is clear, and it doesn’t have to mean anything because association is king, as the admen have known for years.

And then there are a few marketing strategies we can play when the first rush has died and the competitors start crowding us a bit. We accessorize. 

Accessories are like the natural gas in an oil field; they can make you richer than the original bitumen crude. We produce a designer line of air bottles, embroidered air bottle holders, airway tubes with cute little nostril retainer clips. They’ll be more popular than red ties at a Republican retreat.

We become “Official Air Supplier” for national sports teams, or the Olympic Games itself. We get tobacco companies to co-sponsor youth sports competition  with us, with a bit of grease for the FIFA boys in the soccer world. We rerun those pictures from emphysemics anonymous.

Finally, we sell out to the BIG food distributors because they have the purchasing clout to force stores to carry the product or deny them access to their other items such as milk, bread and vegetables. Like the grocer told me once, “If you want us to bring you California lettuce in January, then you gotta watch California strawberries rot on our shelves in July.”

So, there it is, Wannabe Wealthies. You can pack in that thankless job of entertaining the masses who only look at your Facebook food postings on their way to the comics, and make some really big bucks, or you can keep slaving away. I’ve read your new age happy talk and inspirational re-quotes. You need to get out of your mom's basement more often.

love ya,

Oh Two Berich