Trust no one

Every time I think I've seen the worst thing I'll ever see, along comes the worst damn thing I'll ever see. Here is yet another reason for me to bristle whenever Dad or r suggests that I really ought to buy a cell phone. These motherfuckers here have finally done it. They have officially turned your whole goddamned life into one hollow marketing event.

The sausage campaign was organized by a small, three-year-old company in Boston called BzzAgent, but that firm is hardly the only entity to have concluded that the most powerful forum for consumer seduction is not TV ads or billboards but rather the conversations we have in our everyday lives. The thinking is that in a media universe that keeps fracturing into ever-finer segments, consumers are harder and harder to reach; some can use TiVo to block out ads or the TV's remote control to click away from them, and the rest are simply too saturated with brand messages to absorb another pitch. So corporations frustrated at the apparent limits of ''traditional'' marketing are increasingly open to word-of-mouth marketing. One result is a growing number of marketers organizing veritable armies of hired ''trendsetters'' or ''influencers'' or ''street teams'' to execute ''seeding programs,'' ''viral marketing,'' ''guerrilla marketing.'' What were once fringe tactics are now increasingly mainstream; there is even a Word of Mouth Marketing Association.

Remember good 'ol Gen X and how we were all supposed to be too smart and cynical to fall for this kind of shit? Well, as we all know, that sellout train left the station years ago, but just look at this.

The endless chatter of American consumer life that BzzAgent has infiltrated is not simply a formless cacophony; it has its structures and hierarchies, which have been studied exhaustively for decades. Tremor, the Procter & Gamble word-of-mouth unit, which also does work for a variety of non-P.&G. clients, was founded four years ago with those structures in mind. A key Tremor premise is that the most effective way for a message to travel is through networks of real people communicating directly with one another. ''We set out to see if we could do that in some systematic way,'' Steve Knox, Tremor's C.E.O., said recently. He added a second, closely related premise: ''There is a group of people who are responsible for all word of mouth in the marketplace.'' In other words, some friends are more influential than others, and those are the ones who are chosen to join Tremor.

Who are they? Check out the word-of-mouth industry's favorite graph. The graph is meant to show the pattern by which ideas or products or behaviors are adopted, and it looks like a hill: on the left are the early adopters; then the trend-spreaders; the mainstream population is the big bulge in the middle; then come the laggards, represented by the right-hand slope. This is not new stuff -- Knox himself cites research from the 1930's, as well as the 1962 academic book ''Diffusion of Innovation,'' by Everett Rogers -- but it has become extremely popular over the past five years or so. Seth Godin, who wrote ''Permission Marketing,'' ''Unleashing the Ideavirus'' and other popular marketing books (and whose ideas partly inspired BzzAgent), uses it, as do dozens of other marketing experts. Malcolm Gladwell's ''Tipping Point'' made an argument about these ideas that was simultaneously more textured and easier to digest than most of what had come before (or since), and it became a best seller. But whatever the intentions and caveats of the various approaches to the subject, the most typical response to the graph is to zero in on the segment that forms the bridge over which certain ideas or products travel into the mainstream -- influentials, trend-translators, connectors, alphas, hubs, sneezers, bees, etc. Let's just call them Magic People.

Knox said that Tremor's approach to finding the Magic People is intensively researched. The company tries to isolate the psychological characteristics of the subset of influential teenagers, and has developed a screening process to identify them. The details of this are a secret, but as an example, Knox noted that most teenagers have 25 or 30 names on their instant-messaging ''buddy list,'' whereas a Tremor member might have 150. Tremor recruits volunteers mostly through online advertisements and accepts only 10 or 15 percent of those who apply. The important thing, Knox said, is they are the right kind of kids -- the connected, influential trend-spreading kind. Knox mentioned a focus group of Tremor kids in Los Angeles, where several teenagers showed up with business cards. Magic.

How do you like being a bunch of sheep who do and think and buy whatever the "magic people" tell you? I hope you assholes are proud of yourselves.
Look, you know it's evil shit when you see the obligatory meaningless marketing "verb" rear its souless head.

Finally, while BzzAgent tells its volunteers that they are under no obligation to hide their association with the company and its campaigns, the reality is that most of them do hide it most of the time. They don't tell the people they are ''bzzing,'' that they really found out about the sausage, or the perfume, or the shoes, or the book, from some company in Boston that charges six-figure fees to corporations. ''It just seems more natural, when I talk about something, if people don't think I'm trying to push a product,'' Karen Bollaert explained to me.

Why why why, Ricky, did you have to link to this and ruin my night? Here is some additional commentary I would like to add:

Geez God what the fuck oh my god really? Really? What what what!! Aww geez I can't believe the.. ohhhh man!! Fuck fuck fuck!!!