Gonzo Marketing by Christopher; Locke

Author:Christopher; Locke [Locke, Christopher;]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2010-06-30T04:30:00+00:00

Brand Id

I first heard from Brian Millar soon after the cluetrain manifesto appeared on the web. At the time, he was working at RMG International, a subsidiary of The WPP Group. WPP is arguably the world’s largest advertising and public relations conglomerate—we’re talking motels on Boardwalk. Brian sent me e-mail that became an article, “Modern Life is Rubbish,” which I published on personalization.com. “We now benefit from economies of scale at the cost of any modicum of humanity creeping into our dealings with brands,” he wrote. “But I think that it’s a temporary problem, because many of these Industrial Age monoliths are pretty doomed.”12

He has since left RMG and WPP and started a company of his own, called myrtle. The site says:

myrtle is a new company which helps brands communicate in an accelerated culture. Yes: people are more contradictory, more aware of choice, more demanding and less ready to be talked down to or imposed upon than ever. No: they can’t be bribed, they don’t think your ads are entertaining any more and they resent being sneaked up on. Yes: our work starts with consumers. We find patterns in the chaos of their lives.

By the way, myrtle is also his dog’s name. “In a market that’s accelerating in incomprehensible ways,” Millar explains in e-mail, “doing nothing is the greatest risk of all. And in a market that’s a conversation, the winners are going to be the people with something to say. Our website represents our brand’s id. All the sneaky little things we’ve always wanted to do and say are out there for everybody to see.”

Sneaky little things like what, precisely? Well . . . myrtle imagines “ultranarrow ultramodern microchannels” offering endless loops of sampled video—people swearing for hours on end, for instance, or interminably strung-together car chase scenes. “It’s a meaner, more lizardly attitude to our treasured media archives,” Millar admits, tongue firmly in cheek. “But then, nothing’s sacred.” Brian tells me that myrtle is also offering “Turin Shroud duvet covers. The extraordinary deposition image, only shown in public once per generation, preserved on your comforter forever. A gift to treasure. Yes. What have Turin Shroud duvet covers got to do with running an ad agency? Frankly, nothing as far as I can work out. But I bet they’d look nifty.”

And then there are a number of items such as . . .

Human Crisps: If it’s okay for vegetarians to eat, say, bacon-flavour snacks because it’s just “pretend” or “bacon-effect” and contains no actual animal products, then we want to eat human-flavoured crisps. It’s only fair that carnivores get a share of the new fiction-food market too. So while you’re thinking, hmm . . . who do I want to eat the most, please understand we don’t want just any person-flavour. We crave celebrities, novelists, philosophers, stars of stage and screen, athletes, musicians and (where available) leading figures from history. In snack form. Let’s be clear—there’s no actual human in them, so it isn’t cannibalism, just hugely similar, and about as close as we’ll ever get in today’s world.

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