Playboy (PLA) tends to be associated with the magazine and sex. Not the hardcore, nasty kind, of course -- Playboy has always been more than a tad distinguished, staying above board while the adult entertainment industry has chosen to compete in ways that my editor would delete if I even attempted.

With Iconix said to be interested in acquiring Playboy, it needs to think about where it can win with the ailing brand. The smart move may be to ditch the magazine and move away from sex -- it can't compete in either of these markets. Then, it needs to figure out how to make the brand relevant to everyone not in the Boomer generation ... or treat Playboy as an investment with a clock on it.

AOL Money & Finance ran a story from ABC News last week about -- what the social label generators are calling -- the Generation of the Millennials. I'm not exactly sure where Generation X ended and the Millennials began, but there's one thing I can tell you for sure: The manufacturers are having fits with both them. I call them the "Channel Changers" because that's the mind-set I see slowly oozing out of many of them. As soon as one task becomes mundane or tiresome, they flip their minds away from what's in front of them and search for the next thing that might grab their attention. Of course, there are exceptions to this generality and I have run across many young workers who have the patience to perform mundane tasks, but let there be no doubt that the society of instant gratification has come with its price tag.

Possibly it's not all their fault. Many of them are accustomed to getting things the way they want, when they want. What we have here is not so much a young population of sluggards as much as it is a population of wanna-be administrators. The problem is that they lack the knowledge their predecessors have learned coming up through the ranks, and they are resistant to taking the time to figure it out. The problem is further compounded by the increasing number of parents who will go to great lengths in the attempt to mold the world to fit their children rather than sending well-equipped offspring out to carve their own niche in it.