This is the third installment in CBO's continuing serialization of
Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices ["87 used & new from $0.47"]. The first part is
here and the second part is
here.
But first, a word from our sponsor... Uh, no. Just kidding. More like anti-sponsors. I often find it worthwhile (often hilarious) to read the 1-star reviews on Amazon. So here's a handful of quotes from the worst of the worst on Gonzo Marketing...
Locke's writings lack focus and are void of humour.
A real diamond mine -- had to move a ton of coal to find one carat.
The book is baroque, convoluted and difficult to plow through.
I found this book to be down right awful -- even dangerous if it falls into the hands of a gullible marketing manager... He is a windbag that likes to hear his own voice, but this Gonzo marketing concept is nothing more than the equivalent of an acid trip being documented on paper.
Ah yes, how true. How all-too true.
Learning to think outside the box,
"Crackerjack concept," she said,
removing the toy.
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But pressing on bravely nonetheless. Once again, the passage in red, immediately following, is for continuity with the previous episode. "Will the Cheerios Kid save the maiden? Let's find out..."
It's totally over the top. I love it. But finally I have to get out, get real again. I give my talk on gonzo marketing, then ditch the chauffeur. I take a train, then a bus. I get lost. London is better at eye level...
Introduction [continued]
Waiting for History
"There was a demon that lived in the air. They said
whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up,
their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The
demon lived at Mach 1... They called it the sound barrier."
- from the movie,The Right Stuff
"We're never gonna survive unless we get a little crazy..."
-Seal
I round the corner in Covent Garden and hear what sounds like
Coltrane wafting up the block. Bent into his horn as if in fervent
prayer, a musician is laying down fat splashy bop notes in the rain,
punctuating the oblivious crowds of pre-Christmas shoppers. His
saxophone case is open for donations and I drop in a ten pound note.
He's surprisingly good to be playing in the street. Seeing the
denomination, he jumps up and presses a compact disc into my hand. I
turn it over. Karlsax Online it says.
The rain forests of the world constitute a cauldron of biological ferment and co-evolutionary experimentation, a living ecosystem where few parts exist independent of the whole. Lianas and mahoganies, primates and insect colonies, jaguars and bromeliads, slow-moving sloths and dazzling butterflies, intermittent light and impenetrable darkness, the endless cycle of rain and evaporation, transpiration and erosion, all weave together to produce a tapestry of nearly unimaginable color and complexity. The human world is no less complex, and the Internet reflects a similarly rich interweaving, the customs and experience of myriad diverse societies and cultures. The net is a planet-spanning virtual ecosystem, a cognitive rain forest teeming with new concepts and connections, issues and inquiries, studies and speculations, proposals, predictions and unlimited potential.
Something's shaking, something's up. But we're none of us quite sure what it is, what it all adds up to. How long will we have to wait for the history books that explain this amazing period we're living through? Fifty years? A hundred? I don't know about you, but I don't have that long. As you may recall, we die. My dates are the same as Jackson Browne's. "In '65 I was 17," he sang in Running on Empty. Plus: "gotta do what you can just to keep your love alive" -- immediately thereafter warning of the dangers of confusing that with whatever you need to do to survive, to "make a living" as we say. And now you're wondering again: Jackson Browne? Hey, when you write these sorts of penetrating and insightful business books for busy executive types, you take your inspiration wherever you find it.
In the meantime, the time of our lives, all we have is intuition
and stories to try to make sense of the world, to provide some sort of
vision of where we're at and where we may be headed. But that's not so
bad. As a species, it's all we've ever had.
Gonzo marketing is the shorthand I use for the work I do -- work I
fell into almost accidentally, rather than as a path I set out on
knowing in advance where it would lead. At first, I looked for models,
guidelines, some sort of framework that would make sense of the
business world I suddenly found myself inhabiting. But what I found
seemed oddly broken, or ill-conceived from the outset. Perhaps because
I came to the computer industry from such a contrasting set of
experiences -- brain surgery (yes, really), railroad braking, goat
husbandry, boat carpentry, pharmaceutical, uh... mergers and
acquisitions -- most of what I saw passing for best practice seemed
naive to the point of being ridiculous. Even from the inside, it felt
demeaning.
At first I thought I'd get the hang of it with time. But I never did. Along the way, I've become less and less professional. To make a living, I had to find something I could do that actually worked. And to work for my company or client, first it had to work for me. Call it a character defect, but I'm no good at anything I can't put my heart into. So I explored. I followed my heart. And I began to discover that many of the things that worked were the diametric opposite of what was normal and expected in business. In fact, the more diametrically opposed, the more contrarian the approach, the more effective it tended to be. I began calling these directions, attitudes and informal rules-of-thumb "worst practices."
"How often have we heard this boast from yet another ill thought-out dot.com company before the tech stock collapse last year? Locke mimics a start-up whizz kid, circa 1999: "It'll take us a million for the site, another million for the ad campaign, but think of all the ways we can monetise a billion clicks. We'll hit break-even in 90 days and how soon can we IPO?" ... This can never be the reality, as the would-be internet billionaires found to their cost. Locke cites the teenager who pops a page of dancing hamsters on a website which pulled in billions of hits in two weeks. Total cost $29."
from: Charles Leadbeater, the digital adviser for Channel 4, describes this book as "Pink Floyd meets business -- over-the-top, infuriating, provocative, entertaining and always stimulating." And he's not wrong.
source: Sunday Business (London), 11 November 2001
They aren't algorithms or recipes. They're not procedures. They're inclinations and actions that flow from a particular state of mind. And states of mind don't lend themselves very well to bullet points. However, they can sometimes be transmitted through stories. Stories don't deal in definitions and formulas. Instead, they convey impressions, colors, connotations. Their effect is cumulative. The whole encompasses more than the sum of the parts, suggesting new ways to look at problems. And sometimes, imaginative new approaches to solving them.
I once heard a talk on aircraft design in which the speaker explained the aerodynamic basis for a scene in a movie I saw as a kid. I can't recall the name of the film, but I've often used this scenario as an analogy for solving critical problems by going against "the rules" dictated by the sort of sanity and logic that would apply under normal conditions. In the movie, various test pilots attempt to fly an experimental plane capable of supersonic speed. As the plane approaches Mach 1, something strange happens to the controls. Instead of causing the plane to climb, pulling back on the stick puts it into a dive, with terminal consequences for both plane and pilot. Finally, our hero, Chuck Yeager, breaks the sound barrier and lives to tell about it by reversing the normal procedure. As the plane begins to bore in, he pushes forward on the stick instead of pulling it back. The story may be apocryphal, but the point is that the pilot never would have survived unless he did something that was -- according to all available evidence up until that time -- a little crazy.
This story was retold by Tom Wolfe in The Right Stuff, the 1979 book from which the movie was made four years later. Wolfe was fascinated by people who did the wrong thing at the right time -- like Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters dropping way too much LSD in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. But that was later. In 1973, six years before The Right Stuff, Wolfe wrote another book called The New Journalism, in which he included Hunter S. Thompson's story "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved." Here Thompson answers a worried question from his illustrator, Ralph Steadman:
"Is it safe out there? Will we ever come back?"
"Sure," I said. "We'll just have to be careful not to step on anybody's stomach and start a fight." I shrugged. "Hell, this clubhouse scene right below us will be almost as bad as the infield. Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier as they lose more and more money. By midafternoon they'll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomiting on each other between races. The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It's hard to move around. The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up."
He looked so nervous that I laughed. "I'm just kidding," I said. "Don't worry. At the first hint of trouble I'll start Macing everybody I can reach."
[13]
And Dr. Thompson has been Macing everybody he could reach ever since. He's reached quite a few. Merriam-Webster defines gonzo as "idiosyncratically subjective but engagé." As dictionary definitions go, this one's delicious. A bit fruity perhaps, but a great nose and a nice finish. It also means "bizarre" the lexicographers add rather woodenly, ruining the whole effect.
Thompson created gonzo journalism, a genre in which high humor
meets bad taste. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas burst onto the
literary scene with tsunami force in 1971. It was shocking,
electrifying. He was simultaneously writing for Rolling Stone
magazine, and the rock-and-roll connection was no accident. There's a
clue here the size of Everest that, to this day, remains invisible in
plain sight. Around the same time, the Temptations were singing Papa
Was a Rolling Stone, the Rolling Stones were singing "I bet your mama
was a tent show queen," and Thompson was writing: "Moments after we
picked up the car, my attorney went into a drug coma and ran a red
light on Main Street..."[14] It makes the historian's task a real bitch when
everything is connected and nothing is what is seems.
But gonzo is far more than the shock tactics it employs. "The
writer must be a participant in the scene while he's writing it,"
Thompson said. Being a full participant in events, having a point of
view, a deeply personal perspective: gonzo is about being engaged
. It's not distanced, impartial or "objective" -- it cares about
outcomes. When Hunter Thompson wrote about Nixon, he wasn't just
writing about one of two presidential candidates. He was writing about
someone he hated -- hated to the point of intimacy, so much that he
almost loved the man. When Thompson got done with Nixon, Nixon wasn't
an abstraction. He was as real as a hurricane hitting into the Keys.
As concrete as a head-on train wreck.
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 cornflakes.
to be continued
NOTES
[13] Hunter S. Thompson, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved," included in Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism, Harper & Row, 1973. p. 179.
[14] Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, Vintage Books, 1971.
Hartsock [the author of the book being reviewed], a former journalist and now a scholar based at SUNY, Cortland, provides a complex genealogy for an orphan form. Literary journalism is usually considered not literary enough for literati, not journalistic enough for journalists. But somehow the effort to create writing that offers both truth and a narrative has survived through centuries. Hartsock, perhaps stretching, finds its origins in Roman times. In American terms, he traces it through three flowerings -- the century-ago age of such writers as Stephen Crane and John Reed; the 1930s, with, for example, John dos Passos and James Agee; and the "New Journalism" of the 1960s and 1970s, the glory days of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Hunter Thompson, and kindred. Hartsock perceptively distinguishes literary journalism not only from workhorse "objective" newswriting but from journalistic sensationalism and muckraking. The other forms, he contends, set journalists at a safe distance from their subjects; literary journalists get close, even attempting to stand in the subjects' shoes. Today, he concludes, literary journalism as a genre remains marginalized, not least because the majority of schools of journalism and mass communication have excluded it from their curricula.
[emphasis mine]
from: A History of American Literary Journalism: The Emergence of a Modern Narrative Form, book review by James Boylan
source: Columbia Journalism Review, 1 November 2000
Copyright © 2000 Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism
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.
