What Is Different: Tobacco vs. Cell-Phone Ads

This column was originally published on RealMoney on July 13 at 10:12 a.m. EDT.

Most analysts have spent the last few years trying to explain the almost uninterrupted growth of the U.S. economy over the last 15 years (and the last four years of it in particular) by pointing toward a profligate Federal Reserve policy. Greenspan has certainly presided over a Fed that has kept rates at far lower levels than his immediate predecessors, but I think it's dead wrong to cite the Fed as the primary driver of this boom.

It's a technological revolution that's driving this expansion, and the Internet and the communications revolution may really be changing the dynamics of the heretofore accepted economic cycles.

Bears will surely start trying to chastise me for proclaiming that "it's different this time," but let's call a spade a spade. This long economic boom in the U.S. economy is remarkable and the reason all these analysts have spent so much time and energy trying to explain (critique) the dynamics that have driven the boom is precisely because it's been different this time.

Tero Kuittinen cited one of the most remarkable aspects of this economic cycle the other day when he noted that it's been 15 years since the last serious Anglo-Saxon consumer recession. This is the longest, sustained economic uptrend that has ever happened. But rather than trying to fit the reality of this sustained consumer boom into a preset agenda of accepted economic theory, I think we should consider the impact that technology has made on the consumer, and how the consumer is being targeted.

What is it that's really been different? Well I almost fell out of my chair the other night while having drinks with a bigwig at a major music/men's lifestyle magazine. I asked him what sectors were his biggest advertisers today vs. 20 years ago.