Logos, Culture, Paranoia, and Google AdWords as Poetic Medium
Obsessed as I am with the reach of this blog, I wanted to find out if my last post about absinthe had gotten me any Google-love. Turns out the interweb contains a boatload of absinthe-related content, so Ye Olde Talente Blogge wasn't showing up in the first several pages. I switched tactics and did a search for "Marketing & Hallucination." My post shows up first! I sent myself flowers immediately.
Although the likelihood of anyone doing a search for those two terms may be small, it did return 266,000 results. One concerned an anti-fungal drug that had the side effect of causing people to see Wookies. As strange and intriguing as that was, I was more impressed by a site called Logo.Hallucination. (That link goes to the Logo.Hallucination "concept" page, if for no other reason than that the homepage contains some, er, "adult" imagery.)
The brainchild of one Christophe Bruno, Logo.Hallucination relies on neural network image recognition technology to scan images on the web, detect whether or not an image contains a facsimile of a copyrighted logo, and then sends a letter to the owner of the image encouraging them to contact the company concerned. The most amusing part of the "prank" is that the letter suggests that the company should pay the image owner for advertising and promoting the company's brand.
Bruno is what they used to call a "conceptual artist," and his concepts generally focus on the Web, human culture, and capitalism. For example, the Logo.Hallucination project posed the following question: "Is the economic dynamics of the collective hallucination leading us towards a privatization of the glance?" From a conceptual standpoint, his Human Browser project, in which a human being serves as the interface to Google, is certainly fascinating, but the project I thought that you marketers and advertisers would be most interested in was called, "The Google AdWords Happening."
Bruno opened an AdWords account and started buying keywords like "symptom," "money," "dream," etc. Instead of writing traditional ads to go with the words, he started writing quasi-Dadaist poetry such as, "Words aren't free anymore/
bicornuate-bicervical uterus/one-eyed hemi-vagina." Google shut him down fairly quickly, though not due to the content of his ads, but because they were under-performing. According to The Google AdWords Automated Performance Monitor, this was due in part to the fact that "the content of your ad does not accurately reflect the content of your website."
The most interesting insight that Bruno gained from this experiment was that "... we have reached a situation in which any word of any language has its price, fluctuating according to the laws of the market." His name for this development is, "semantic capitalism."
The Situationists called this mis-use of everyday objects or systems "détournement." I call it bloody brilliant.
Image courtesy of kandinski.
