The leading graf in red is for continuity with the previous installment. I wonder if you'll get as tired of reading that as I am of typing it? But necessary to say. By the way, apropos of nothing terribly important, I've been thinking all day how odd it is that it's taking me longer to mark-up these fragments than it originally took me to write them. Hmmm... maybe that's why Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices ["87 used & new from $0.47"] sold so well. Depressing thought #473. Well, never mind. Here we go again...

Gonzo journalism represented a significant shift in news reporting, or at least the option of a new direction. It granted other writers the permission to be human, to stop pretending they were automatic cameras recording events about which they had no opinion, in which they had no personal stake. And it granted this permission even to writers who didn't sprinkle acid on their morning corn flakes.

While the so-called legitimate press (where does that come from?) has not exactly risen to the occasion in overwhelming numbers, plenty of net-heads have. In the next X years, billions of dollars worth of news, information, entertainment and what I like to call "The Artist Formerly Known As Advertising" are going to do a full 180. That is, a very large proportion of these media functions will no longer be delivered top-down, as in the broadcast model, but will be coming bottom-up from creative individuals on the Internet. X may be two years or five years or ten -- the question is not if but when. These changes are inevitable for reasons the balance of this book will explore more deeply.

Business created mass markets through broadcast advertising, the same stentorian voice of command-and-control it used on workers, but in this case applied to the marketplace. "Shut up and do what you're told" is not that much different a proposition from "shut up and buy our product." The "shut up" part was built in to broadcast, as there was never any back-channel -- never a way to ask questions. The 30-second jive-and-jingle TV spot was never an invitation to converse.

The Internet brings something different into the world. It has connected people person-to-person, and the people so connected are today talking among each other about things they truly value. People are telling stories. With the advent of the Internet, markets have again become open, unconstrained conversations. Free talk. And the best conversations, the ones people gravitate toward, are based on stories. If the pitch is the epitome of broadcast, the story embodies the essential character of the Web. Stories, like conversations, don't have targets, fixed goals, Q2 objectives. They circumambulate their subjects. They explore. They don't have mission statements.

From the dawn of human society, people have been drawn together by storytellers who not only shared their interests but also had a special quality of speech -- let's call it voice. True voice is not just the ability to speak, but the ability to speak effectively. The best measure of this effectiveness is whether a particular voice can attract and hold an audience. This is as true today as it was in Neolithic times. Tom and Ray Magliozzi are Click and Clack, the self-styled Tappet Brothers of National Public Radio's "Car Talk" show. They're funny, engaging, and they know their stuff cold. I don't know what a carburetor even looks like, but I could listen to these guys for hours.

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"These research findings are hardly complex," says Tom Magliozzi (who, incidentally, has a Ph.D. in research). "They concluded that distracted drivers get involved in accidents. Duh. The authors of the study say they were simply attempting to develop a taxonomy of distractions. This hardly requires a database. One need only take a drive on any highway in the country to see people reading the newspaper and drying their hair. Why use a database that clearly does not collect such data and then publish percentages?"

from: Car Talk Brothers Accuse AAA Foundation of Irresponsibility: Cell Phone Press Release Misleads Public and Lawmakers
source: PR Newswire, 2 August 2 2001

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While Car Talk is an offline phenomenon -- and as NPR's largest non-news program it is a phenomenon -- another critical factor comes into play when the Internet is involved. Because the barriers to entry are so low, storytelling and voice do not necessarily have much to do with what business usually cares most about: the size of the audience. An online audience can be microscopic by mass media standards. Nonetheless, the micro audiences just now taking shape on the net are also potential micro markets. Web-based micromarkets are currently coalescing in real-time around articulate, entertaining, knowledgeable voices.

Take Motley Fool, which began as a minuscule dot in the petri dish of AOL's greenhouse incubator.[15] Today, these "fools" touch millions of personal investors. Micromarkets needn't remain micro. Internet communities have always been self-selecting -- audiences gather around content of high personal interest. In this natural aggregation, online is far more efficient than conventional media. People find what they want not as much through advertising as through far more credible word-of-mouth from friends and colleagues.

The mass markets traditionally served by broadcast media have been steadily fragmenting for decades as a result of global competition. Evidence of this erosion are market segmentation and targeting techniques, which attempt to track the detritus of once-mass markets the way an astronomer tracks the remnants of a burnt-out supernova. As competition for even tiny niches has intensified, market segments have become smaller and more refined, to the point that business is currently in hot pursuit of concepts like personalization and one-to-one marketing. However, many of these "mass customization" approaches still rely on analytic tools developed for conventional market segmentation, which in turn require some sort of historical market data -- e.g., left-handed red-headed 18-25 year old males tend to buy more Snickers bars than right-handed blond 25-32 year old females.

But what happens when such historical data does not exist? Entirely new micromarkets are emerging on the web today. The real challenge lies not in predicting the behavior of markets this small, but in determining their existence. Because they are currently much smaller than existing market segments, they don't show up on conventional market radar screens. Because they have no history and don't behave like the markets that grew up around broadcast media, demographic segmentation is of little use in determining who constitutes these new micromarkets.

These new realities are presented above as seen from a corporate vantage point. From an Internet perspective, web micromarkets don't think of themselves as markets at all, but rather as nascent communities of interest. They tend to gravitate around articulate, knowledgeable, entertaining voices -- individuals or small groups driven by a passion to communicate their views. Because entry costs require high returns on investment, broadcast media rarely offer such emergent voices a hearing. However, the Internet reverses this trend, providing many low-cost vectors for small-scale publishing -- Usenet newsgroups, email lists, weblogs, web pages. Think of these as "micromedia" as opposed to mass media.

Such micromedia will replace a great deal of current advertising. They will quickly become the best source of user-supplied news about products and services (Amazon.com broke new ground along these lines by inviting customer reviews). Potential buyers will not have to hunt down this information, but will find it in the online venues to which they naturally gravitate according to their interests. Companies that engage in this type of dialogue will forge powerful relationships with micromarkets that will soon -- continuing a trend toward market fragmentation that's been in effect for many decades -- become their major source of revenues.

The Internet constitutes a market for ideas -- real ideas that interest real people, not just the feel-good fantasies of product vendors -- what's missing today is an effective method of marketing those ideas undistorted by hype and hucksterism. Mass production, whether of goods or information, has always depended on broadcast marketing in which markets are viewed as top-down targets from the lofty vantage point of long-established power and control. The Internet has destroyed that vantage. Wave after wave of new arrivals have eroded the cliffs it's built upon and the castle is crumbling into the sea.

It's about time.

Net markets are micromarkets, reflecting not the mass of humanity, but rather the voluntary alliance of individuals around deeply shared interests. Because such communities are still growing bottom-up, they don't have the sort of demographic profiles companies have always depended on to identify new business. These micromarkets are just emerging. They hardly exist yet. Invisible to the lens of traditional marketing, they are ignored.

But don't be fooled. Micromarkets aren't insignificant markets, and given the speed of propagation the net enables, their emergence will be faster than the emergence of the Internet itself. This book describes how billions of dollars of advertising, news, information and entertainment are about to shift out of corporate control forever.

The resulting landscape will not be a neat and orderly world, any more than a rainforest, or any physical ecosystem, is neat and orderly. Rather, it will be wild in many of the senses poet Gary Snyder lists in his book The Practice of the Wild:

"free, self-propagating, self-maintaining, flourishing in accord with innate qualities, pristine, ordered from within and maintained by the force of consensus and custom rather than explicit legislation, populated with original and eternal inhabitants, resisting economic and political domination, unintimidated, self-reliant, independent, proud, far-out, outrageous, "bad," admirable, artless, spontaneous, unconditioned, expressive and ecstatic." [16]

Of course, artlessness and ecstatic badness don't always come in such a poetic package. The quality of wildness most lacking in commerce is play. Yet play, once again, is serious business. To the rollicking delight of online audiences everywhere, corporations seem to get easily confused trying to balance their overly earnest brand personas with their All-New SuperCool E-Brand Avatars that plead, "hey look, we're just one of the gang!" The resulting display is a little like watching baboons dress up in Barbie Doll outfits: amusing for a while, but ultimately unconvincing. Play is serious stuff, profound even. While it's hard to describe, we all know it when we see it, flourishing as it tends to do, in accord with innate qualities. Even when those qualities are coming at you right straight off the wall...

NOTES

[15] Motley Fool.

[16] Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, North Point Press, 1990.

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from: Locke: weird turned pro and author of Gonzo Marketing
source: Australasian Business Intelligence, February 28, 2002.

Christopher Locke is the author of "Gonzo Marketing", a new book aimed at revolutionising marketing techniques. He is critical of traditional mass marketing, which is aimed at the "lowest common denominator". Locke says that the Internet has opened up a plethora of "micromarkets". Consumers have become weary of traditional advertising, which merely exhorts them to buy a product. Locke urges marketers to develop more subtle relationships with consumers.