And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [50]
“What we’re looking at here is someone who’s moving ahead in their lives, they’re moving forward in their career,” he said. “It’s a person who’s entrepreneurial, thinking outside the box. They’re generally young, they’re either in a relationship now or are getting married sometime soon, and they’re into activities like music, technology, exercise.”
Really, I reflected, he was describing no one so much as me, whose own marriage was then only six weeks away and who was, at least at that moment, in possession of a gym membership.4
“See the contrast stitching, and the nice chrome accents and details, the piano-black finish—all for less than twenty and a half.” Barry gestured through the window at the dash. “It’s all about how this vehicle looks, how it feels, how it moves, you know?” He delivered his final judgment with genuine awe: “I think we’ve hit on all the senses with this one.”
As we talked, a roadie onstage had begun to test the drums individually. With each stroke a deafening clap shot out across the plaza, caromed off a Brutalist wall, and rebounded past us again, barely diminished. I looked around at the crowd, the average age of which was perhaps nineteen, a motley collection of wan goth girls, leathery semi-drifters, wiry North Shore bullies in wife-beaters. A bleached blonde wandered by in a tight T-shirt reading NO BAR’S TOO FAR. I remarked to Barry that psychographically speaking, the crowd did not seem to be what he and Ford had in mind.
It was true, Barry acknowledged, that the Fusion was “really going for people who are midtwenties to, say, late thirties,” but he added: “We know the vehicle has youth appeal. . . . This vehicle, it kind of shakes things up a little bit. I mean, look at the black one—I think it looks a little bit different from an Accord or Camry,” he said, his tone implying severe understatement. I looked at the black one. In point of fact, the vehicle shook nothing up. Its design was supremely generic, as if an Accord, a Camry, and every other sedan on the market had been meticulously averaged together.
The soundcheck finally went on at nearly six thirty, and afterward I returned to the media desk to wait for the show. A giant Ford rep with a graying goatee asked me about my story. I was writing about what happened to flash mobs, I told him.
He looked at me intensely. “They’re dead,” I heard him say. I stared back at him.
“The Dead,” he said again. “They’d do concerts like this. And raves. Flash concerts are pretty much like raves.” I could barely hide my disappointment at this turn. We looked out at the restless crowd of “flash mobbers” packing up against the stage, their boredom having prompted them to throw a hailstorm of increasingly dangerous material into the air: balloons, then empty water bottles, then full water bottles, then aluminum cans. Sporadic fistfights had begun to break out.
The Ford rep shook his head at the scene and smiled. “Everybody wants to feel like an insider,” he said.
“WORD-OF-MOUTH” MARKETING
If there has been a single most important trend in marketing during the first decade of the twenty-first century, it has been corporate America’s slavering over viral culture, its hunger to create and own just the sort of contagious explosions that flash mobs represented. For the marketers who want to colonize this culture, there is now even a trade organization, called the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA)—“word of mouth,” aka WOM, having emerged as the favored term of art to encompass not just viral ads but the larger goal of insinuating corporate messages into private conversations. The extent of the appetite was on display one sunny December in Washington, D.C., where a few hundred professional