12.8.04: A Consumer Society

An article in the NY Times Magazine section on a couple of companies who specialize in word-of-mouth marketing campaigns. These are campaigns, paid for by corporate clients, to raise the awareness and profile of a product by getting a small army of "agents" to drop a mention of the product into casual conversation, carry it (in the case of a book) prominently displayed on the subway, write reviews to Amazon, ask for the product at shops, all without revealing that one is promoting it.

It's a Philip K. Dick world. There are tens of thousands of these "agents" out there. Ordinary people, not necessarily trendsetters or celebrities, who are living breathing advertisements... and proud of it. We don't know, for example, when someone is merely being helpful of informative, or even friendly, or when they have a hidden agenda. When they're slipping a bit of product placement into the conversation and when they're just engaging in the occasional mention of a book or brand as part of normal everyday life. So, in this world, which is our world, no one is to be trusted. No one's word, on this stuff at least, is to be taken at face value.

And who knows, the same techniques and maybe the same companies use this process for inserting ideas, political opinions and "factoids" into normal society?

Do I sound paranoid? I'm not making this stuff up. I'm merely extrapolating, trying to determine the repercussions of this phenomena and what it means.

For quite a number of years clients have paid what they determined were early adopters and trend spreaders, or even people who weren't but who would be watched — celebrities and models — to be seen drinking a particular vodka, wearing a designer's clothes or hanging out at a new restaurant. No one was fooled, or at least some people weren't fooled. (I would have been fooled, I thought this crowd simply was "in the know".) Anyway, since these folks were paid to sport the product, and made no bones about it, people were somewhat influenced, but not entirely suckered.

But this new process eliminates both the trendies and the payment. Surprisingly, the ordinary people who are recruited to talk up the product are usually unpaid — they usually just get some free samples, and not enough of that to really financially compensate for all the time and effort they put in. But they're proud and thrilled to be the chosen ones, to be influential.

It turns ordinary people into trendsetters, AND it jacks up the idea of being a trendsetter, so that the power to influence implicit in that designation becomes an end in itself. An end created and doled out by the agency.

In the Phillip K. Dick version there would be more convoluted scenarios. The agent would be unaware that he or she was an agent. And when the agent discovered that he or she was an agent it would be through information received through another agent — therefore suspect information by nature. So, in this world, where all information is suspect, one is not really sure if one is an agent or not. One's own identity is suddenly questionable, a classic Dick scenario... suddenly events from one's past can be called into question — did the formative events of adolescence and childhood just happen? Were they all subtly guided by agents and agencies, seeking to create life experiences that can be filled and satisfied with products? When did I become an agent? Or when did I stop being an agent?