The Oscars must reinvent themselves again. They knew that going into this year’s show, and made a game effort. The premier brand in entertainment awards, is adapting to a new world. In this new world, you can’t depend on massive, captive audiences. Even if you’re a pop-culture Titan, you’ve got to woo the viewer and give them something more than just another TV show.

This has been building, and not just in entertainment. The most recent Olympics were brought to us in packaged chunks just once per night, all tape-delayed and edited to create the best story. Every athlete became a “character,” and every athletic event a chapter. Around the same time, the major parties’ nominating conventions, which had in the past merited live, gavel-to-gavel coverage, were relegated to small prime-time chunks, easily avoided. Many at the time said that the networks, due to commercial and other pressures, had become derelict in their duty to provide significant coverage of major cultural events, in favor of scandal, sports, and weather.

I’m not so sure. Somehow, events that used to seem intrinsically important aren’t any more. The question is: What happened? When did the Olympics become less important than previously-scheduled programs? When did presidential political conventions become nuisances? When they started to market themselves like the Oscars.

In all of the spheres of our lives, a handful of ideas rise to the top and become keystones. One that has so risen is “branding.” Whole libraries have been written about it. Seminars exist that will tell you how to create “brands”. It’s so powerful that everyone wants it: even in areas outside of business, people speak daily of wanting to “brand” this or that idea. New-economy management gurus counsel people to remake themselves into “brands.” Nonprofit leaders with a good idea for improving the lives of others now first seek to create a “brand” for their notion.

But, for all the talk of “branding,” the idea around which it revolves has become an empty container. In part, that’s because the idea is so widespread — why, everyone knows what a brand is! There seems no need to define it. However, listen for a while and it will become clear that “brand” is a term that means many things to many people. The books and articles that treat the subject stumble when it’s time to define it. One comes upon the sentence or paragraph that promises to lay out just what a “brand” is — and there’s a linguistic empty space. Or, the definition given is too narrow, out of sync with common usage.

It’s as if the idea is too big, or too important, to be subject to mere definition. Like God, it can only be described in partial ways. Above all, “brandedness” is a mythic state that, once achieved, unlocks the potential for success. And so, in a society where we all think we can (and ought to) get whatever we want, we speak of brand and branding as if we’ve already got it. I have a brand; so do you. My ideas have brands. That new seminar on how to implement a human-resources initiative? Branded. Political candidates? Branded, too. The word no longer really carries meaning. It’s now an emblem that stands, simply, for “success.”

But there are brands and then there are brands. Some brands are so potent that according to one study their devotees would literally tattoo them onto their body: Marlboro, NASCAR, Harley-Davidson. Now that’s brand success. Meanwhile, those of us mere mortals who simply have a good idea to promote, or a good product to sell, believe that we, too, can have what Marlboro and the Oscars have. But, we can’t.

If I say that I have “branded” something, I am saying that it has luster in the marketplace (either the actual one, or in the marketplace of ideas) such that people will immediately be able to identify it when they see it. But, most of the time, for all the frantic attempts to brand everything, what the effort really amounts to is attaching a clever name for something or giving it a logo. I may go so far as to register a trademark. But, none of this adds up to a “brand” in the way I dream it will.

The Oscars telecast has a legitimate claim to being a “brand.” Millions of dollars and years of steady effort have gone into securing that status. But my own civic event? It would be hubris to say it’s a brand.

Nor should it be. Public life has been overtaken by brand-mania, as organizations try ever harder to sell their ideas. It’s a dilemma. In a world with decreasing attention spans, the tactics that seem to work in commerce can be effective in more public-spirited endeavors, too.

But, all this branding activity places everything on the same plane. Any intrinsic value that civic activities might have had gets eviscerated. With a barrage of messages saying “pay attention to my qualities,” it becomes harder and harder to discern any real difference between the Oscars, the Olympics, and the Republican convention.

The more things get branded, the more trivial they seem. Boosters of major cultural events that have the ability to bring disparate people together have relinquished any hold they may have had on a moral high ground. Instead of saying, “These events are intrinsically important,” frantic branding efforts say, “You may choose between watching this event or `Fear Factor,’ it’s up to you.” More and more, it’s all the same, competing marketing messages vying for elusive “mindshare.”

What’s worse, public leaders today have also fallen into the same trap. They drape themselves with slogans, messages-of-the-days, titles for their bus tours, speech backdrops with pithy sayings repeated in TV-friendly script. This can be effective — but at a cost. For each short-term boost, a long term toll is exacted. We become ever more numb to the formerly important spectacles served up for us.

The average citizen is to be excused for staying home, pulling the blinds, and firing up Xbox. Through the very efforts they use to try and reach him, the people who lead our nation — political, civic, and business leaders — have done all but told him to.