What’s the use of watching us?

Big Brother and Twisted Boy, one the moustached Orwellian icon of totalitarianism, the other a hairy gonk sporting ultra-trendy Levi Engineered jeans, might seem to inhabit different worlds, let alone different eras. And yet they have more in common than their bizarre juxtaposition suggests.

For both represent the changing faces of marketing. Only last week, the launch of a new software research tool combining data from the Electoral Register, Royal Mail, Experian and Claritas among others, prompted the Information Commissioner to warn that our privacy as consumers is under threat. A heady combination of electoral information, socio-demographic mapping and aerial photography could soon ensure our every movement is monitored.

The very idea of the marketing industry successfully hatching such a dark conspiracy is faintly ludicrous. At worst, the targeted synthesis of data is likely to lead to increased pester power among what are considered key audiences. Apart from anything else, the active and systematic capture of data on such a mass scale would be prohibitively expensive.

And, it could be added, increasingly irrelevant. The advent of such sophisticated software packages is itself a symptom of increasing disillusionment with mass marketing techniques and recognition that, in the future, marketers will have to be a good deal more knowledgeable, and a good deal less complacent, about the people they are actually seeking to reach.

An illustration can be seen in the dot-com learning curve. Banner advertising as the commercial model, if not exactly discredited, is yielding to a more sophisticated proposition involving transaction commissions, mini-sites, digital direct mail and viral marketing. Yahoo’s diversification from its current growth model provides an obvious example, but the arsenal of online branding techniques now employed by the likes of BA and Unilever are just as telling. Dot-commery may be over as a get-rich-quickly phenomenon; the real value of the Net as a communications tool, on the other hand, has only just begun to emerge.

One of the most fruitful tactics has been to leverage traditional (and decreasingly cost effective) television ad spends with a Net-based viral marketing campaign, which brings, as they say, the TV imagery to a wider audience. Budweiser’s “Whassup” execution has been a particular beneficiary of this technique, spawning in the process numerous spoofs – which then further imbed the brand in consumer consciousness. John West Salmon, Nike and Reebok are not far behind. Arguably, however, the architect, or at least the most successful practitioner to date, has been Levi’s and its agency Bartle Bogle Hegarty. Flat Eric was launched not on TV, but on the Web, back in 1999 – and the integrated campaign has since received innumerable plaudits (including one of our own marketing effectiveness awards). This week the aforementioned Twisted Boy and his Engineered jeans promises to take the viral process one stage further – with what results we will have to see.

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