Every decade has its own zeitgeist

The 1950s was the Engineers' decade. These were the years of great projects such as the Snowy Mountains scheme, satellites in space, the American highway network and the start of man’s landing on the moon.

Meditation, beards, imaginative clothes, inarticulate mumbling, and socially indifferent behaviour were the characteristics of the Woodstock generation of the late 1960s that dominated the advertising of that period. Appeals to the imaginative, creative, internal self were now “in”.

The advertising of the late 1970s and 1980s was aimed at the Hustler. The advertising was dominated by glitter and flash dress. The famous quotation of that time was Gordon Gekko's "Greed is good".

In the 1990s we had John Howard, the Normal’s Normal. Conservatism, political correctness and corporate governance were all important. Howard was right, the times did eventually suit him and he was Prime Minister for 11 years.

In the noughties, the world turned full circle. We were back to the Mover zeitgeist. Films have been dominated by action scences. Everyone uses a mobile phone constantly and the internet is dominated by social networking sites such as MySpace. Kevin Rudd was elected on his ability to tap into the new zeigeist, in particular with his slogan “Kevin07”.

Following the sequence outlined so far the Teens will be the decade of Doublechecker. Avoiding risk will be become the mantra, family and homes will dominate the advertising. I worked in financial services industry since 1980 and one big change in the Teens will be peoples’ attitude to debt. During the Noughties household debt has risen dramatically. Australia is the only country in the world where margin lending and negative gearing exceeds credit card debt. As more and more of the houses of your friends are repossessed, decreasing your level of debt will become the #1 priority of most people. We are already seeing signs of this in the lift of household savings ratio.

However cheer yourself up, the Teens will not be that bad. The real danger decade will be in the 2020s. This decade will be dominated by the P’s desire to win. One obvious conflict will be religious divide between fundamentalist Islam and the atheistic, libertarian West. Be happy you are living in Australia, as far from the conflict as possible.