My friends, each of you is a single cell in the great body of the State. And today, that great body has purged itself of parasites. We have triumphed over the unprincipled dissemination of facts. The thugs and wreckers have been cast out. And the poisonous weeds of disinformation have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Let each and every cell rejoice! For today we celebrate the first, glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directive! We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology, where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thought is a more powerful weapon than any fleet or army on Earth! We are one people. With one will. One resolve. One cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death. And we will bury them with their own confusion! We shall prevail!

(who said this 18 years ago today?)

To make some headway in answering Mike's question, it might be useful to try to dislodge, however minutely, the polarity "sincere conversation vs. hard-nosed biz profiteers" - let's take for a moment Clay Shirkys' perspective here as emblematic of the logic of corporate existence. Assume that we are not dealing with people, but with mathematical and economic mechanisms that have no way of understanding that anything else matters, really, other than the lifeblood of their revenue streams. (I take Clay's point to be, this is how they operate, so get used to it.) The question becomes not whether these entities, these things - using the term advisedly - will "get" gonzo; it's more whether we, as the locus of the new fulcrum of power, will continue to allow corporations to be constituted the way they are under law today. In the Divine Right of Capital, Marjorie Kelly shows how a restructuring of the accounting equations currently used can put disenfranchised employees (currently not even considered hard assets, as Enron reminds us) into a position of belonging to the reason why the corporation exists. I.e., if the fulcrum is moving, it has to move not merely at the point of company-customer contact (whether throught sales or marketing); it has to occur all along the axis of corporate law, accounting practices, and probably capital formation.

Thanks b!X, for putting RB's argument for change so succinctly. If he'd done the same, we wouldn't have an excuse to debate the matter and he'd receive no royalties.

For my part, I don't foresee a transfer of marketing power and influence to the wired consumer so sudden that large businesses will be left out of the loop. I believe the customer has always had the power to choose but has not always exercised that power. Whether or not the Web will initiate (or has initiated) significant behavioral changes, is debatable. Our belief in it having done so is, at the moment, born more of conviction than hard evidence. Personally, I do believe that change is slowly taking place. Consumers are more informed and will become even more so in a process as evolutionary as past behavioral changes (forty years ago, educated customers were laughing at clueless corporates). Of course the clueless will ignore these changes and they will rightly go out of business. Those that acknowledge them, will become even more powerful. I'm talking the likes of Microsoft and .Net here (or AOL should it prevail), not made-for-Web business like the now profit-generating Amazon. I believe we underestimate the power of big business. Does Microsoft not "listen to our needs" and, as a result, do most of us not use their product? Okay, some of those here might not but 100m desktops do.

My point is that the process is as old as the hills and has taken place with the advent of every new medium in the past. In the long run, I believe most large businesses will adapt their tactics to market behavior but they will do so merely to continue exploiting the naivety of the average consumer.

If they do start engaging their customers in forums such as this one, they will do so to maximize priofit rather than indulge in sincere exchanges of mutually beneficial ideas. (Could it also not be that Chris has missed his own point, i.e. that he is tracing conversations that run far deeper, over longer time spans, than those that affect the hubbub of the day-to-day marketplace? I've a feeling he has a book addressing far wider issues fighting its way out of his crazed psyche.)

Back to the business of business though. What I perhaps should have asked in my last post was, "How does a debate like this move from being a prolonged chat between members of the market segment in question (this amounts to a pretty intimate circle of friends) to an engagement with hardnosed businesspeople or those charged with dumping product onto us? Do they give a damn whether or not they drown us in spam, be it in print, email, onscreen, or on the idiot box? Could they care less whether the Web survives another year? We'll always need bleach." The book, after all, clearly articulates its argument and needs little elaboration (I assume). We need some hard-eyed marketing practitioners rousting things up a bit. I suspect they might raise many of the same questions as Andrew Goodman of Traffick does in his now complete review of the book. Responses to the questions Andrew asks would be illuminating for business, the potential customer, and our buddy now eking out his existence on the publisher's pence.

These sources are enough to convince me that, just as this list is not designed to be the hotbed of a counter revolution reclaiming our right to choose the way businesses speak to us, the book itself will do little to change the way business does business.

My understanding of CTM and Gonzo thus far (I'm about halfway thru the latter book now) is that it's not merely about business changing the way it markets. It's about the power and influence of marketing changing hands from those businesses to (I hate this word but I will use it here anyway) consumers, thanks to the rise of networks both technological and social.

When it comes to business, the point (as near as I can tell) is that they either participate in this shift, accept it and become a real part of it -- rather than try to manufacture markets thru manipulation and sheer fiction -- or they are going to have signficant troubles.

I'm still divided on to what degree I believe all of this. But this is my read of the proposition.

Since we're confessing... I now own all three, have read most of GM, read quite a bit of the Rants and Screeds as they appeared but not in the bound version, and haven't chewed into CM yet but have followed the whole reformation thing since soon after the theses were nailed to the virtual cathedral of commerce's door.

I don't think there is a roadmap here nor is one needed. Nor do I believe that there is anything to teach the b-school buffoons or the global corporate carrot-ocracy. Those who can feel the water rising will learn to swim. Those who can see the icebergs ahead may correct their courses.

What seems important to me is the improved access to information and the reduced transaction costs associated with web. This seems trivial as I write it, but the micro-market model posited in GM is probably no more important than the macro-information exchange possibilities. The markets-as-conversations model is important, yet the content of the conversation, the truth of the information exchanged is what dominates. There has been an important discussion on the cluetrain mail list about voice. As important, and not discussed recently, is the leveling capacity of the web as far as content is concerned. The truth is out there in a thousand voices. I'm convinced that that this tool, the net, can provide me the info I need to identify the best muzzle for Fang and the best price for the muzzle. What more do we need. (Fang of course is pissed since why would I muzzle a talking dog anyway?)

Anyway, "hyperlinks subvert hierarchy" and "smart markets will find suppliers who speak their own language." That's a lot of what it's about.

I must admit to something.

Beyond the online version of CTM and the teaser material from GM, I have read neither. But Chris Locke, Dave Weinberger, and Doc Searles sold me on them a long time ago and I will eventually acquire my copies. In South Africa, spending $20 on a book is becoming increasingly indefensible (I'm becoming quite comfortable crying penury as the ZA Rand slides ever deeper into recession – it can’t be good for me). Nonetheless, as their initial popularity fades in the North, we will gain reasonably priced access to them and I will eventually settle down to wading through their content.

In the meantime, though, I can only judge GM's content by its cover, by what is said of it, and by the behavior of its author.

These sources are enough to convince me that, just as this list is not designed to be the hotbed of a counter revolution reclaiming our right to choose the way businesses speak to us, the book itself will do little to change the way business does business. The stereotypical businessperson, whether in a marketing or any other policy making position, does not readily adopt what he or she construes to be the latest, flavor-of-the-month approach to marketing. In the main, businesspeople are inflexible. They take a hell of a long time to put common sense to practice. New ideas, concepts, and templates for their implementation, must be hammered into their heads with the utmost sensitivity (not exactly a word that springs to mind where RB’s concerned).

I'm interested, beyond the reviews, in finding out what impact GM has had to now. To this end, I'd be keen to know if RB has figures on the number of copies pre-sold into business schools, universities, and other higher-learning institutions. Is he able or prepared to divulge such information. I'd be most surprised to find out that it has not been adopted or is not on the reading lists of tertiary institutions across North America and Europe. It is in these places that tomorrow's marketers are being bred and, at the moment, they are still being force fed the same old crap taught their fathers.

Until their diet changes, little else will. We will continue to be affronted by 90-second TV adverts punting the good work environmentalists are doing in far-flung corners of paradise while in the employ of the oil companies burying the same places in toxic sludge. The thought displeases me.

Mike Golby
http://pagecount.blogspot.com

damn sad to see you go fishrush...
but "I will get byeeeeeeee..." somehow.... and yes, I'm keeping the highly coveted award... unless I'm s'posed to throw it over the fence at the White House like some kinda disgruntled VietNam vet giving back his highly prized medals for valor and being there and what not...

Fishrush, fishrush, wherefore art thou, fishrush?

thank you for visiting the site. i'm kaput, spent, done, finished, so there won't be any more updates. i've gotta get back to work or go skiing or something...
shalom - may that which is good be with you, in you and all about you on your journeys.

~ fishrushed


And suddenly a hush falls upon blogland. The fish are quiet, sleeping beneath the coral reef, waiting for the current to sweep something their way.
It won't be the same without ya, fishrush.

Um, can we keep our award anyhow?

The Gonzo approach to TV ads on the web was Adcritic.com, of lamented memory. It provided a useful cultural reference point by digitising ads and posting them on the web, but it ran out of money for the bandwidth bills and business types it picked up (It used to be one chap in his bedroom with a VCR and a computer) and it never was paid by the advertisers involved.

The NY Times is bringing television ads to the web:

Television is without a doubt the most effective channel for promoting brand recognition. But the question of how advertisers can create ads on the Web that are as effective as those on TV may not be worth asking--especially when the answer is to simply put TV ads on the Web

But step back - how is Bleach made? It uses chemicals that can cause pollution. In fact it is a chemicla tht causes pollution. There is a big constituency of people who care about this, and you could have a Gonzo campaign to promote your better process, or less damaging bleach alternative.

Here's a question. Which would be more gonzo: An alternative-to-bleach manfacturer starting or becoming involvedin a site where people discuss such products, their uses, and their alternatives; or a bleach manufacturer opening and/or sponsoring (or whatever) a website for people to discuss such products, their uses, and their alternatives?

Bleach is a problem though - not much scope for product differentiation there; all you are buying is a simple chemical compound. You can add scent to it (like Chlorox do) and you can sell it in different concentrations, but basically it is a pure commodity.

But step back - how is Bleach made? It uses chemicals that can cause pollution. In fact it is a chemicla tht causes pollution. There is a big constituency of people who care about this, and you could have a Gonzo campaign to promote your better process, or less damaging bleach alternative. Of course, you'd have to create a less damaging alternative or lose your market...

How about heavy users of bleach? People with obsessive-compulsive disorder? Maybe not.

I know, how about new mothers - they need to sterilize things a lot, or think they do. How about a Gonzo campaign to support new mothers? Like this one?

(BTW, who chose the invisible link colour combination here - it turns my linksinto a braille interface).

Clay,

Gotcha.

But that's not an advertising or even marketing problem, its an economic problem about the price that clears the market. If no-one really cares about bleach sufficiently to pay for it then you give it away. If that doesn't suffice then you make something they do care about (sufficiently to pay for).

I suspect that people do care about bleach in the sense that they care about clean linen, but that they don't care for CPG spamming on their idiot-boxes. There's nothing an idiot likes less that being called an idiot, didn't you know?

Are you really contending that the only solution to the problem of a warehouse full of product essentially indistinguishable from its competitors is to lie about its qualities to squillions of people in the hope that a percentage of them will be credulous enough to pay you for it?

Is marketing really just sophisticated bullshit?

Marketing is (correct me if I'm wrong) about: How do we let people know about us and our stuff?

How does traditional CPG marketing do this? Is it effective?
(Not being clever, I really don't know and want to know. My personal view of most such advertising is that it is counter-productive, but I recognise that the people paid zillions of simoleons for doing it aren't likely to say so. I just get on with my life and mostly ignore it.)

Coke for instance, I drink because I like the taste. I like the caffeine/sugar rush, and I hate Pepsi, it's just too chemical a taste for me. I also like the fact that Coke leaves your teeth feeling clean. (I dislike the knowledge that this is because its base is such a powerful degreaser that the people who haul it have to have a HazChem licence, but hey! life's not perfect.)

Anyway, the point is that Coke ads are completely wasted on me, for the most part (the small possibility exists of a new flavour being of passing interest, but history would deny even this, since most such efforts have been catastrophic failures) as are most competing product ads, since I LIKE COKE!.

I further suspect that most of the target markets of such ads are not too different from me.

Clay. So basically you claim that they're not broadcast?\

Not at all -- I think they _are_ broadcast, by which I mean that the reciprocity in the relationship between the average reader and the advertiser is very low. My mentioning those C(onsumer) P(ackaged) G(oods) campaigns on the Web was to contradict the idea that CPG can't use the Web.

I spoke with one of the orignal Cluetrain authors about this over the weekend, who said roughly "The problem with Gonzo and CPG is: how do you advertise products no one cares about? How do you sell bleach?"

Clay. So basically you claimt hat they're not broadcast?

Do they spam?

Like Frank, I'm not game enough to register in order to find out . . . . .


Jeneane, it goes on your forehead.

There is no denying she has her fans (warning: get ready to hit esc to kill the midi!).

Where can I get one of those? Google tells us more. And more.

I heard she uses a butt double on TV.

Okay, more than a couple people have asked: What's CPG? And, no, Frank, nothing with the words "martha" and "stewart" on it is a good thing. Least around here. She makes most women feel like a complete and utter in-the-home failure, although scant few of us would want to actually *be* her. On an unrelated note, since I've been in round the clock work mode and have no brain cells to spare, please know that I'll be gone for a few days. Back Tuesday. Going to do the obligatory "inlaw" dance--that's the little number where I pay my husband back for living near my crazy relatives all these years. (Now, where'd I put that "I'd rather be blogging" blogsticker?)

blogon.
-j.

So I went to the Kraft Foods site thinking to find some insights re. CPG and the web. Instead I found a rather attractive user focused site that offers a meal planner, an onsight recipe box, recipes by email and a bold link to contests and promotions. I wonder how many members they have and I wonder how badly you'd get spammed (and by whom and for how long) if you registered for membership. I don't wonder enough to register! If you don't get spammed I'll bet Kraft at least slips you an Oscar Mayer weiner. These people are probably soaking up a larger and larger number of upper middle moms with kids in school and a PC with browser in the kitchen telephone nook. (One upstairs in the office and one off the great room in the den too probably, but the one in the kitchen phone nook is the cutest because of the quilted cotton dust cover with the prairie print that matches the toaster cover.

Is there a point Frank? Well, no, not really... I was just looking for sites that I thought might have a Martha Stewart evocative cornflower blue patterned background, and GUESS WHAT? Kraft Foods has one! Is that a good thing?

Denver, that's what I thought about the relation between Gonzo and broadcast.

And the examples I posted (chosen at random, in less than 5 minutes of looking) do precisely refute his proposition, namely that there is no CPG broadcast marketing on the Web.

The efficiency of that marketing relative to Gonzo is another story, though, and one that involves the kind of math that people here seem to hate, namely "how effective" divided by "how costly".

Hey Jeneane and Clay,

By definition: NO broadcast message can be Gonzo!

Shouting at everyone, - and particularly those people who don't want to hear you, and may actually have asked you politely to "Please! STOP!" - is not a conversation, nor is it particularly engaging.

SPAM != Gonzo

Although eventually, these nascent efforts at being marginally less than a completely overbearing prick may mature into something Gonzo-like, they can never do that while they are still *broadcast*!

So, while they may be admitted into the category of CPG broadcast advertising *on the web* (which was the original term used by Gaspar Torreiro) on a technicality, this doesn't really refute his proposition, IMHO.

On the contrary, their primitive efforts to imitate Gonzo-ness while refusing to give up their innate prickhood is rather a solid endorsement of Gonzo, albeit one it could probably do without.

What guys like
Important free speech discussion ongoing now at Sandhill... tune-in, turn-on, gross-out...

Jeneane,
Things are moving fast at Sandhill. With just a modicum of spammage we've assembled a team that is North American bi-coastal, and has members from at least three other continents. This has got to have short wave radio beat. In the spirit of sharing and to emphasize the cosmopolitan nature of Sandhill Trek, I've blogged a piece of email I received from Nigeria today! This is an exciting opportunity! read it and tell me if you think it counts as Gonzo Marketing. Also, I wonder what a fair percentage to charge Abdulkamiri would be? Also, do you think blogging this email violates the implied non-disclosure agreement and voids the contract?
Frank

Hi Clay,

I checked out the examples you mention below, and in my mind, none of these are gonzo. They are all top-down messaging that doesn't really enable any kind of dialogue with or *among* customers, employees, etc. I suppose an argument can be made that the Coke Unity Chain has real people's real voices embedded. But somehow I can tell when a company's sincerely trying to reach/engage/grow with me and my fellow travelers, or when they're just creatively deploying the latest cute Web toy to make their same old points. I can't tell you the parameters around that, but I know when I'm being talked at.

Thanks for keeping this lively!

j.

I cannot recall one single example of CPG broadcast advertising *on the web*

Well, I suppose this gets at the heart of what is and isn't Gonzo. Is Coca Cola's "Unity Chain" Gonzo? Is Clorox's Generations and Innovations Gonzo? Is Procter & Gamble soliciting feedback on Cascade Gonzo? They all make nods at user involvement of some sort or other, and they are all CPG. Where do they fit?

Received this in the mail for the consideration of the group:

Jeneane,

Sorry to bother, but may I comment on this snippet?

"Denver, I get that clocke thinks broadcast marketing doesn't work on the Web. I just think he's wrong, or rather, that the places where Gonzo works are more limited than they seem at first glance. Both you and Hernani have suggested that consumer packaged goods, e.g. Coke and Jell-O, somehow "don't count", but CPG advertising is the majority of all advertising, so a revolution that doesn't change CPG doesn't really change the advertising landscape as a whole."

I cannot recall one single example of CPG broadcast advertising *on the web*: when you say broadcast I think "spam!".

Locke's point (as I perceive it) is a very simple one: people are paying less and less attention to broadcast media, and more and more attention to voice. Industries that rely on broadcast *alone* find that their target/eyeballs is shrinking and cost per *successful contact* (annoying people does not count) is growing like mad. They better pay attention to this shift or they will find themselves advertising to an empty audience, precisely because they cannot broadcast to the web.

Of course, this does not mean that everybody must dump broadcast and do *only* gonzo from this very minute.

Gaspar Torriero
http://www.gaspartorriero.it/blogger.html

Clay,

Good stuff.

I still think that you're more focussed on the quantitative than are most other folks here, who are here (at least in part, seemingly) because of the qualitative and therefore exhibit a marked preference for that side of the debate.

I also think that this whole debate at cross-purposes is illustrative of another of chris' observations about traditional marketing theory about "markets" versus the messy reality of engaging with real people. One of the reasons it seems that marketers prefer unidirectional methods is that they don't know how to converse with people! But, if this is so, it is hardly a criticism of conversational engagement.

However, I wasn't rebutting your original post (however much it may have seemed that way - I am far too fond of a good argument so sometimes my mode of expression is unthinkingly aggressive) I was only offering some alternative ways of thinking about the matter. They may or may not be valid, true, or even useful. Just try them on for a bit and see how they fit. If you don't like them, put them back.

I understand the math involved, and I recognise its legitimacy, particularly with regard to scaling issues as you described.

As far as being a book goes, well, I can tell you that very few people have ever offered to pay me for my writings. A more interesting question, or perhaps a question to which the answer might be more interesting, is: "Why is GM-WTWP a successful book?"

(relatively successful anyway, sorry Chris . . . . )

Ask Chris about the Amazon Sales Rankings and their relationship to the EGR letters his alter-ego produces. Ask him about the Sales Ranking of GM even before it was published.

If the number of successful books versus dogs is the be all and end all of quantifying the success of unidirectional methods, then by any objective measure book selling as a unidirecional method is a catastrophe! The ratio of decent product versus crap is overwhelmingly loaded on the crap side of the ledger.

But, of course, anyone (and particularly marketers) are entitled to claim that book publishing is a success because it is profitable. But whether or not marketing can or would want to claim responsibility for its gross inefficiency in terms of selling profitable books is concerned, is another question all together . . . . . . .


Movin' around
Like a knight, on the town
Well it ain't what you dance
It's the way you dance it.

- more from The Spinners

Clay, "...how come Gonzo Marketing is a book?" Royalties certainly. Noblesse oblige, probably. Rather than kvetching about the one-to-many versus interstitial influence models (not to be confused with "one too many versus interschtshul infre ahh you know whadd I mean" model) it probably behooves us to return to a perspective on the medium under discussion. The non-corporate PC user (70% of us have them in our US homes now) has an entirely different relationship to the medium than the magazine/newspaper reader or radio/television audience member. We are out here seeking... plane tickets, fruit trees, new chemotherapy ideas, assisted living alternatives for mom, software, and also entertainment. The net drives transaction costs down. It broadens market availability of products. And it provides idea-space for communities of interest to share information regarding products. So the numbers game may be an interesting but orthogonal perspective from which to view what's actually going on and what is possible. The blogsticker party comes to mind here. This site is getting lots of traffic and interaction. The scaling issues you brought up of course apply. And there's no score being kept with $(US). But the contagion seems to be there. It's a screaming meme and if there is commercial value, it will be different from the consumer packaged goods models. Or will it? I've been waiting for someone to come up with cyber green stamps, and maybe this is the foundation for that effort. Maybe not. Meanwhile, I think I will buy one of those nifty looking web TV cameras I see advertised after my visit to many websites. NOT!

Denver, I get that clocke thinks broadcast marketing doesn't work on the Web. I just think he's wrong, or rather, that the places where Gonzo works are more limited than they seem at first glance. Both you and Hernani have suggested that consumer packaged goods, e.g. Coke and Jell-O, somehow "don't count", but CPG advertising is the majority of all advertising, so a revolution that doesn't change CPG doesn't really change the advertising landscape as a whole.

The central dilemma of Gonzo, from my point of view, is scaling. You've suggested that every member of a 100 member micromarket is also a member of any number of other micromarkets. (This is the 'Small Words' structure, most rigorously described by Duncan Watts in a book of the same name, and made famous by Malcolm Gladwell in 'Tipping Point'). So, starting from one person in one micromarket and the idea that "any number" is, say, 10, you are one hop from 1,000 people ("my friend says..."), 2 hops from 10,000 people, (A friend of a friend says...") and so on.

Now its easy to see, a la the old Clairol ads ("...and she tells two friends...") that this is in theory a fantastic way to spread the word about something. It is also easy to see that the actual effect is much more limited, for 3 reasons:

1. Not everyone in a micromarket will become an evangalist
2. The ones that do will be of varying effectiveness
3. As the group grows, the number of overlaps, where you reach people who have already been converted, will grow

These three characteristics make the shape of word-of-mouth a logistic curve (like a stretched out letter 'S') rather than a simple ever-upwards curve of explosive growth. In other words, for any infectious spread (viruses, memes, protocols, whatever) there is always an upper boundary.

So, to reach a million people (and remember, there are products used by a billion people, so a million is setting the bar pretty low) you would have to gather *everyone* four hops from you. Now what are the chances that 1 million people are going to become passionate about something because you are, which is to say because their friend's friend's friend's friend likes it? Nil, of course -- you can't even get all thousand of your putative one-hop friends to agree on anything. And once you start introducing inefficiency and non-takeup into the equation, Gonzo starts looking to me like a pretty resource-intensive way (esp when counting time as a resource) to get a million customers.

So let me propose a hypothesis: There are no products other than software that have ever reached a mass audience without some use of a broadcast (which is to say one-way, one-to-many) medium.

The same question, put another way: if uni-directional models are so bad, how come "Gonzo Marketing" is a book?