"You don't grasp the beauty of the destruction of words."

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten. Already, in the Eleventh Edition, we're not far from that point. But the process will still be continuing long after you and I are dead. Every year fewer and fewer words and the range of consciousness always a little smaller. Even now, of course, there's no reason or excuse for committing thoughtcrime. It's merely a question of self-discipline, reality-control. But in the end there won't be any need even for that. The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect."

George Orwell, 1984

Newspeak. In 1984, its a vocabulary invented by Big Brother that we would use to talk to each other, and come to eventually think in. It would affect our language, our thoughts, our actions, even our ability to act - you can't act on a thought you can't have.

Buzz Marketing. In 2004, it was the (ongoing) attempt by marketers to get us to talk about their products with our friends, family, acquaintances and strangers. Once the geniuses on Madison Avenue realized that we talk to each other about new and interesting things, they decided to co-opt this basic human mechanism - a mechanism Darwin would tell us exists for survival of the species - to advertise their products.

It's human nature to talk about what's new. It's this behavior that helped us figure out what was okay to eat and wear. What places were safe and what places were dangerous. 5 million years later and these are still the things we're talking about - where to eat, what to wear, and what status symbols can help us advance in our tribe.

Perhaps you're old enough to have seen that commercial from the 80's where the shampoo girl tells us that if we tell two friends (2), and they tell two friends (4), and they tell two friends (8), and they tell two friends (16), then pretty soon the whole world will be talking about their product.

Or, perhaps, you saw that movie with young upstart actor Will Smith called Six Degrees of Separation, which told us that any one of us is connected to everyone else by no more than 6 other people. Heck, George Bush and John Kerry are cousins 16 times removed. In theory, I could start a rumor that, within six generations of being told, would reach the President of the United States, The Dalai Llama, or a rice farmer in China. In theory anyway. The technical term for this is the small world phenomenon.

All this, I guess, comes from Chaos Theory, which is a mathematical concept that says that the way the butterfly flaps its wings in India affects the weather in Kansas, and if I'm in a grumpy mood because I stepped in a puddle of water, the way I treat other people that day could cause a massive traffic accident. I'm rude to person A, who spills coffee on person B, who now has to go the store to buy a new shirt for his big presentation and cuts off person C, who slams on his brakes, angering person D and... well, you can see where this is going. Small actions can escalate into big ones.

This concept has been floating around for a while now, and can be seen in movies like It's A Wonderful Life and A Christmas Carol, which was published as a short story by Charles Dickens in 1843. If one life, even that of poor George Bailey can affect an entire community, then just think of the marketing potential you could have by reaching all the George Baileys of the world and getting them to espouse your product. Old man Potter tried to do this and failed. Buzz Marketing is trying to do this, and succeeding.

So Buzz Marketing is Chaos Theory Marketing where we're the chaotic particles. Forget about controlling the traditional channels of communication like television and magazine ads, if you can control the people and what they talk about you'll achieve more with less. This thinking has influenced everything from marketing products, television shows ("the show everyone will be talking about"), and political campaigns.

The current, heavy-handed techniques often involve one or more of the following (and probably a few others that I left out).

1. Buzz Marketing (Objects)
     The Virtual Bartender (adults only, please) is an example of this. Ask her for a mixed drink, and she shrugs her shoulders. Ask her for a beer, and she brings one to you. Ask her to take her shirt off, and she does as well. After this was released, several thousand geeks were sharing possible commands that would get her to do things, like kiss another girl, or bend over and show you her cleavage. Or the dancing robot Citroen, where a car turned in to a Transformer like robot and started break dancing. Or the amazing Honda ad, which, interestingly, is itself a demonstration of chaos theory - one small motion sets off a series of larger ones.
     I bet after following those links, you'll be tempted to pass them on to your friends. Good boy, I knew I liked you for a reason.
     On the other hand, an example of what not to do is Burger King's Subservient Chicken. Viral marketing, that's advertised widely on TV (what's so viral about beaming it into everyone's living room?). And it's just not compelling.
2. Viral Marketing (Sign Up Your Friend)
     Friendster is the classic example of this. It doesn't work unless you get your friends to join in with you. Cell phone companies use this heavily, promoting "free calls to anyone in our network" with, probably, some degree of success. "If I can convince my friend/relative to get the same cell phone provider I'm on, I can talk to them for free." Instant Messaging is another example of this - unlike email, it's not enough that I have an address, it has to be given to me by the same provider as my friends. Another, more subtle example is Evite. My friend always sends me these "evites" for her parties. I have to log on to their website (confirming I exist) to RSVP. While I don't have to do anything with that, perhaps I'll decide to use them for my party too.
3. Buzz Marketing (Events)
     To unleash a (then) new line of cell phones that could take pictures, one cell phone company hired actors to go to the Empire State Building and ask to have their picture taken. This, inexpensively, introduced people to the product so that they would talk about it to their friends, and so on. Heck, the only reason I heard about this was because some website wrote about it - the buzz around the campaign itself caused me to hear about it from someone who wasn't even there.
4. Buzz (People)
     This is where some of the controversy begins. Is the stranger you're talking to really interested in talking to you, or are they interested in selling a product? Even more devious, is your friend talking to you about his new MP3 player because he really likes it, because it was given to him for the explicit purpose of talking about it, or both? What does he get by buzzing the MP3 player? Perhaps by buzzing it enough, he gets the ability to buzz more products, getting access to more and more "free" stuff.
     Both the Democratic and Republican Parties employed street teams to spread the word. They targeted likely voters and had people visit them before the election, and on the day of, to sway their views and get them to vote. By all accounts, the Republicans were better at this than the Democrats. Were these really concerned citizens, or were they tools of the marketing campaigns each party created? Probably it's a mix of both, which is a conundrum. They were working for a cause they believed in, but the tools they were given (lists of people compiled from massive databases, PDA's with video customized to that person's interests, etc.) reaches far beyond what they could've done on their own. The real question is - were these people really expressing their own ideas, or the ideas of someone else?

Why do we have a problem with this kind of marketing? Well the obvious answer is that it's devious. We don't know it's marketing, so we can't process it as marketing. The message we believed we we're immune to (even though we weren't), gets past our defenses and connects with us deep inside, beyond where television reaches, to a place where only direct contact with other human beings, our friends and family can reach.

In the worst case scenario it's a lie. Not a lie designed to spare our feelings (No, that dress doesn't make you look fat), not a lie designed to protect the dignity of the person telling the lie (I did not have sexual relations with that woman), but - on a small scale - a conspiracy. Your friends have become double agents, pretending to befriend you, but really they were only interested in selling you something. Or maybe they're really interested in your friendship, and someone planted a message in their head, "tell them about your new sneakers."

This kind of thing happens in movies all the time. "Yes, I was paid to marry you, but I've grown to love you!" And what's the inevitable conclusion? The main character is hurt and betrayed. Whether or not he can forgive the other person - or, more importantly, whether he decides to rise above the situation, like Truman did in The Truman Show, or sink back into it, is up to the discretion of the author, but this contrived example can tell us a few things about Buzz Marketing.

This co-opting of social behaviors, the mechanisms of trust, the things that keep our society together can only have one logical conclusion. An increasingly savvy (read: wary), disconnected and cynical population. Take two examples from different parts of the country.

Joe is a store owner in Small Town, USA and wants to advertise his store, so he hires someone to go out and "paper the neighborhood." They stand on street corners and hand out flyers, put flyers under car windshield wipers and in mailboxes. The campaign works brilliantly, everyone stops for a flyer, and they even comment on it to each other as they walk past, and make conversation with the kid handing out the flyer, perhaps because they know him by name. Joe is someone the community likes, and they want to support him and his business.

Steve is a store owner in New York City, and also wants to advertise his store. Just like Joe, he hires someone to hand out flyers on the street corner. But nobody stops. Nobody even acknowledges that this kid exists. Out of the tens of thousands of people who walk by, a few hundred pick up a flyer, and most of them end up in the trash. Steve is nobody to them, and they resent being told to shop at his place.

New Yorkers are jaded, and they know that nine times out of ten when someone walks up to you, it means they want something from you, and it isn't directions. Sure they'll gladly help a tourist, and many tourists are amazed at how friendly and helpful New Yorkers are, but that's because we can smell tourists the same way we can smell homeless people asking for a handout.

If the Buzz Marketers have their way, every person on the planet will be approached by friendly smiling familiar faces like it's Small Town, USA - with our defenses down - and then sold to. Repeatedly. Until the entire world is like those hard-nosed New Yorkers, who won't even look at you as you pass by. People will become more and more isolated from each other, perhaps creating more and more rigid definitions around who's a friend and who's an acquaintance - who you trust, and who you don't. The underlying assumption of our relationships will change.

Maybe I'm being extreme, but if Buzz Marketers have their way, anyone who isn't being sold to will be doing the selling. They probably only need 0.001% of the population in order to do this. All they need to do is be the butterfly in India and someone in Kansas will buy their product.

They need to do this because we're already becoming jaded to the existing channels of marketing. Advertising agencies read reports that are filled with news like "Branding is dead" and "There's so much noise, so many products, that you need to find a new unique way to cut through the clutter."

The advertising methods that worked on the baby boomers aren't reaching the younger generations, so soft drink companies come up with an insider ad campaign that acknowledge how ridiculous it is to sell to you. "Image is nothing. Obey your thirst." "Make 7, Up Yours." They say "Yeah, we know it's ridiculous, and you know what? We know that you do too." Wink, nudge, buy our product.

Toyota's Scion line has opted for a completely underground ad campaign. One visit to the Scion website and you'll see underground styling - pixel art, a matte/drab color palette, etc. You can completely configure your car online, and take the print-out to the dealer to pick it up.

The corporations know that being part of the group mind no longer means being told that your neighbors are buying Tide, but that not only are your peers buying this product, but we're not even going to bother marketing it to your parents. In fact, your parents won't even know it exists because it's never on TV and never in the magazines they read. If it is on TV, it's on during your shows, and the ads will be so cutting edge that they'll appear as noise to your parents.

In short, this product doesn't exist in traditional marketing channels. This is advertising for the Napster Generation. You have to be on the inside to get the message, and if you're not on the inside, we don't want to have anything to do with you. You have to know where to go in order to get music (before the RIAA shuts it down), and you have to be on the inside to know about the Scion.

Enter BzzAgent. They specialize in word of mouth marketing campaigns. People volunteer to advertise products. Their credo is "consumer empowerment," and a quote on their website compares buzz marketing to the open source software movement.

"The open-source movement has taken the world by storm. Get ready for it to turn its sights on marketing and advertising. Marketing has long promised interactivity, but it's remained more myth than reality. Maybe we got it wrong. Perhaps what people want isn't click-and-branch "interactive" marketing. Perhaps what they want is creative freedom and control."

- Hans-Peter Brøndmo, Open-Source Marketing, 8/23/04

And why do people want to get involved with BzzAgent? Well, at first it's the free stuff. They'll send you products as long as you buzz them to everyone you meet. Then it's because you feel cool because you're on the cutting edge of technology, fashion - whatever it is that excites you, whatever strokes your ego. Attention given to your product is equated to attention to you, and you have to have another conversation piece in time for the next party. What would we talk about if the marketers didn't tell us what to talk about?

All this ignores the fact that the fabric of our society is being rewoven with BuzzSpeak. There was some (ahem) buzz a while back about the possibility of the New York City Transit Authority (the MTA) selling its train stations to corporations, so you'd get the "Nike Times Square Station" or the "Pepsi Union Square Station."

What a coup it would be if the language we use to travel became intertwined with product names! You could no longer give a tourist directions without telling them "Look for the station with the Nike logo." or "You're going to get on at the Chrysler station, follow the Jeep Unpaved Underground path, take the Grand Cherokee line uptown and get off at the IBM Central Park Station."

And what a coup it will be when BuzzSpeak becomes the norm and we develop a Product Placement Vocabulary.

The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

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