Transmissible spongiform encephalopathies.
Back toward the end of the ’90s, a throwaway bit in Wired imagined advertising as a virus, mutating and adapting to fill every conceivable niche in the ecosphere of attention-mongering. —A meme, yes yes, but at least a rather specific and concretized example of one, with better metrics.
The bit ended by proposing a king-hell ad-beast slouching through a climax forest of synergistic marketing opportunities: let’s say (it said) that Nike starts buying 30-second TV spots and airing nothing. Not an image, not a sound, not an icon, not a blipvert at the end to brand the logo on your consciousness: just 30 seconds of empty blank nothing. We’d all know, of course, because everyone would be talking about Nike and their crazy empty ad scheme, and constant repetition would drive the point home until every blank wall, every cloudless sky, every television tuned to a dead channel would whisper Nike to our lizard-brains.
Magnificent (for some values of magnificent)—and yet we all know that pound for pound it’s the little things that best succeed in filling niches: the microbes, the bacteria, the virii and prions, like what I saw crawling through the ESPN chyron as I was buying a burrito for lunch: the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl. How can one begin to measure the return on an investment like that?
