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By Root 789 0

actual corporate decision-making process—allowing you to engage, debate and discuss what you think is relevant.” What the consumers found irrelevant, it seems, was Ford Bold Moves in its entirety: the number of blog posts linking to Ford Bold Moves during the entire six months of its operation was eight. It was hard to imagine that the number of consumers seeking out a soap opera about I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter was significantly greater than that. Generally I am not disposed to pitying corporations, but I confess that sitting there in the Ronald Reagan Building, I found something almost heartbreaking about most of these WOM campaigns, with their grandiose expectations of how deeply consumers want a “relationship” with the companies that manufacture and sell them stuff.

I thought about Ford during its mid-1980s revival, when my parents, who like most other Americans then had just about given up on Detroit and its hulking, unreliable cars, were won over by the Ford Taurus. The 1986 Taurus ads can be found on YouTube, and what seems remarkable about them today (besides the embarrassing hairdos and music) is how actively they sell the product—how much they assume that the person on the other side of the screen is not some puppyish potential brand evangelist but someone for whom a product was to serve a specific purpose in an otherwise nonbranded life. We see parents and kids packing up their Taurus sedan. “The traditional vacation in the family car,” the announcer intones. “Except one thing’s changed—the family car.” Ka-pow! Key change, and the singing starts: “Taur-us!” We see a montage of all the great features of the Taurus, from its curvy design to its innovative, computerized-looking dashboard, which made driving a Taurus in 1986 feel like flying a spaceship. And then here comes the singing again:

Now, there’s an American car—That has exactly what—We’ve been looking for—Taur-us!

The ad ends with the Ford corporate jingle of the day: “Have you driven a Ford lately?” This jingle, the reader may recall, was delivered in a singsong cadence, a perfect pause interposed between “Ford” and “lately”—the joke being that of course you’d driven a Ford before, but it was back when Fords were no good, or even further back when they were good; but today they were good again, and if you hadn’t driven one lately then wow, you should.

The jingle represented an era when advertising was active, but now the jingle is dead, replaced by licensed pop songs or by generic pop songs designed to sound like whatever is on the radio at that moment. Today, advertisers seem to think that their best strategy is to be reactive, giving us whatever “brand experience” we want right now, allowing us to “hijack” their brands, in return for what they hope will be a lasting sort of engagement, even devotion. It is, I fear, a leap of faith from which they are unlikely to emerge uninjured.

EXPERIMENT: BILL SHILLER

One has to marvel at what these corporations imagine their customer today to be: an impossibly enthusiastic creature who loves their brands so much that he wants not merely to buy their products, and even on some level to identify with them, but moreover wants to spend a not insignificant portion of his leisure time self-consciously working as an evangelist for them, as if he were a traveling salesman, except without the pay or the ready opportunities for adultery. It occurred to me that I should try to be this customer, at least for a short while, in order better to understand this odd proposed marriage between hawker and sucker. When a consumer becomes a de facto salesperson, is he or she still a consumer in the same way? How does his relationship with the product change? Is she still being sold on the product or is she now, on some level, selling herself on it?

Hence the birth of Bill Shiller, the ideal viral consumer, a man who behaves exactly as his corporate interlocutors desire him to do. He was born with a minimum of labor: I simply set him up a Gmail account (bill.shiller@gmail.com) and a MySpace page (www.myspace.com/billshiller)