A Visit From the Marketing “Buzz” People

A few days ago, this site got looked at by a large marketing concern whose CMO coined the marketese CGM (Consumer Generated Media). This huge company also markets itself as “the global measurement standard in Consumer-Generated Media.” Being in the marketing game, that is, the game of perception-magickians for hire, it’s no surprise to me that this faithful army of the marketing gods “help[s] promote and protect brands by measuring CGM and listening attentively to the pulse in online “buzz.”‘ Through the use of marketing metrics, these faithful soldier-magickians “give marketers and intelligence professionals an advantage by locating, measuring and analyzing CGM in wholly new ways so that it’s understandable, real-time and actionable.”

That little line about marketers and intelligence professionals being the folks that this company gives an advantage to says quite a bit to me about how the lines between the covert actions of government and corporations continues to blur. Reality is like that, though. When you start digging deep and exploring at the edges, seemingly concrete boundaries bleed together and it’s hard to see where or if they exist. And my suspicion is that it’s been this way forever, but now it’s becoming pretty explicit. And do marketers really do anything different than what the magickians and priests of state in ancient empires did? After all, marketers are the trade of molding perceptions/realities to the benefit of their patrons. The other thing magickians-for-hire have long done, from olden times up to John Dee in the Elizabethan Court, even up to Aleister Crowley and, perhaps, Gurdjieff’s possible services for Russia and Tibet, is to function as spies, “listening” (as the CMO of the above-company likes to tell you with the constant mosquito-like “buzz”ing of hypnotic jargon) to their targets, gathering information, cloaking themselves. Same with the people in Big Marketing who, like diligent spies, report back to their clients in ways that are “understandable, real-time and actionable” (just like this Big “CGM”-monitoring company says on its website).

But “actionable” in what way? If only I knew on whose behalf this marketing/ intelligence work took place. On behalf of some dog food company, maybe?

Here’s a quote from a pod interview with the unmentioned CMO (because I’m not into giving free advertising to groups that don’t need it!) that I listened to out of curiousity yesterday:

“We all know from marketing that, you know, emotion–hierarchies of emotion typically lead most brand strategy documents and that’s typically you’re trying to hit certain emotional attributes in your media spend and in your messaging.”

…And on the metrics side, it might get into things like volume, share, favorability, depth of influence. We have something we call dispersion, which is very interesting, especially on the crisis management side which is to what extent did the negative commentary jump the shark or jump the fence to multiple boards.”

This guy’s gotta funny way of using the term “jump the shark.” As far as I knew, it referred to the point at which a sitcom makes the transition from engaging to unwatchable (from wikipedia):

Jumping the shark is a metaphor that was originally used to denote the tipping point at which a TV series is deemed to have passed its peak, or has introduced plot twists that are illogical in terms of everything that has preceded them. Once a show has “jumped the shark,” fans sense a noticeable decline in quality or feel the show has undergone too many changes to retain its original charm.

I wonder why he’d use that term for negative commentary on a company or a product by citizens–yes, citizens–that begins to spread online? Maybe he just wanted to use a “buzz” term despite being clueless as to it’s meaning? Or maybe he was “rebranding” the term to emphasize how it’s not in the interest of his company’s clients for this to happen? Maybe that’s it–and nevermind whether the negative commentary is deserved or not, so long as it can be analyzed and quantified and some big company can get “actionable” on its ass, whatever that might entail. My bet is it wouldn’t involve actually changing what the company does, not really, not if it can be helped, just spinning a few “rebranding” or “re-imaging” spells so their citizen-customers will go back to sleep-buying, minds nice and shiny, with their mouths and their wallets wide open for more consumption.

Here’s another neat quote from this high-powered, happy, hip-looking, anonymous “buzz”kill:

“The future of marketing is all about how we, um, develop both offensive and defensive radar in understanding what consumers are saying to guide better decisions and ultimately win consumer loyalty. Because consumers today are definitely rendering judgement on companies based on the extent to which they respect their voice. Think about it.”

Offensive and defensive radar? Radar is an interesting metaphor for listening, since it’s originally a wartime technology used for locating an enemy’s position so that you can attack it with the advantage of distance and invisibility. Of course, it is also used defensively to monitor one’s own territory and combat attacks. So is the enemy the “consumer” or just what the citizen-customer says that the big corporations don’t like? And the metaphor of a companies’ voice is definitely interesting–if this is the business of perception-control it makes sense that simply changing how the “voice” (I assume he means the marketing/propaganda) of a company sounds would be seen as the magic solution to “win” loyalty. I guess lots of cult leaders, politicians and the actors that pass for news anchors these days have respected voices, too–at least for those on the inside, where the loyalty lies.

“Think about it.”

Here’s my favorite part of the interview with our Mystery CMO and it comes right at the end of the interview:

“Consumers are an energy force and people are very self-conscious about how consumers feel and think about them, it’s just that they don’t necessarily have a real lense into those thoughts and reactions and i think that as we see more transparency in the marketplace, that is to say financial analysts are now dipping into consumer opinions about brands, product launches and the like, I think there’s a much higher level of sensitivity about how consumers react.”

Did you catch that nice trick? “People are very self-conscious about how consumers feel and think about them.” And who exactly are the “people”? Apparently not the “consumers”–they’re “an energy force” (or maybe he meant “source?” like gasoline to a car or deer to a wolf). And I fail to see this as a flattering statement about citizen-customers, despite how hip or respectable the voice saying it sounds.

So who’re the people he’s talking about here? The marketers and their clients, the big companies? Yeah, that sounds about right. Well, fancy that.

Here’s the Buzz

Look, I have friends who have done or still do work in marketing. And they’re nice people. That’s right–I acknowledged it: they are people. Most of them enjoy their jobs because they get to analyze patterns (like a conspiracy theorist does) and be creative (albeit in a very limited scope) and get paid to indulge all the things that their marketing tells them they should–travel, good food, good liquor, a gym membership. But they know not what they do–and that’s scary. The companies they work for and their clients, while “containing” people much like themselves are not people: no, large corporations are gluttinous, abstract gods–false idols–and worse. They are hungry ghosts, egregores/tulpas-gone very bad.

Now I should only hope that when my marketing friends go to work they don’t forget that I am a person. Not an “energy source.” Not a fucking abstract “consumer.” If they remember that, then there’s still hope for them.

But I’m afraid it might be too late for Mr. CMO.

Last Thing

Oh, and if you wanna know who this guy is, what his company is and where to find the interview I quoted from, I think I’ve left enough clues.

But…if you’re not ambitious enough to search it out, you can just start here.

Oh hell, why be cryptic?–you can just “listen” to the CMO of “Buzz” for yourself here.