Buzz: Would You Change Your Name for This Man?

“There’s a sense of history in the air. Can you feel it?” the welcome letter in my WOMMA summit binder begins. “You’ve answered the call to be part of something truly special … for the first time, the best and the brightest are all together in one place to share and learn from one another.”
The best and the brightest are also busy buzzing their brightness to others. Even their titles seem like brands: There’s a “media catalyst,” a “chief evangelist,” even an “influencer marketing manager” in the house. Plus a man and a woman from an outfit called “Church of the Customer.” The summit begins.

This is a time like no other, we are told. The Old Media Paradigm is breaking down. People are TiVoing out their commercials. They’re getting all their news online. They’re ­comparison-shopping on the Web. Companies are wising up. And the consumer trends are all spreading via word of mouth (WOM). The bike-­messenger-fueled resurgence of Pabst Blue Ribbon! The Sideways-driven spike in sales of pinot noir! Those damned rubber bands you’re all wearing! None of which earned a cent for the Old Media Paradigm.

Mark Hughes used to be part of that Old Media Paradigm. Raised a nerd — as many marketers will admit they were — in then-backward Hong Kong, in a family of Christian Scientists (his father, a foreign correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor, didn’t take him to a doctor until he broke his wrist at 12), Hughes spent much of his first three decades trying to get into the box. He joined a fraternity, got his MBA, met his wife working at ­PepsiCo, left for a cushy job as Pep Boys’ youngest corporate officer. And spent $40 million on Old Media ads and commercials every year for Manny, Moe and Jack.

Then, in 1999, Half.com, a marketplace for the public to sell books and CDs, lured him off the corporate “treadmill.” Josh Kopelman, the company’s young CEO, was determined not to pay more than $5 apiece to acquire customers. It was a comically small amount in the days of PETsMART, CDNow, and the near limitless ranks of dot-coms trying to grab market share at lightning speeds. But Kopelman didn’t think traditional media would work; he wanted buzz. So he hired a firm — “Twenty-somethings dressed entirely in black,” according to Hughes. They sucked, and Hughes started panicking. But inspiration struck: He would bribe — well, offer $100,000 in computer equipment and services to — a small town, preferably a town with “Half” in its name, if it agreed to rename itself Half.com. He would put the brand on the map by putting the brand on the map!

After a few calls, he found Halfway, Oregon, population 360, which for a brief period when the deal was finally inked was visited by a media mob. The Today show “broke” the story, though the Inquirer had been writing about it for weeks. The story spread virally. The South China Morning Post picked it up, and Time Magazine called it “one of the greatest publicity coups ever.” In a feature story, the New York Times quoted one Half.com resident concerned his town was becoming “the nerd capital of the world.” Six months later, eBay acquired Half.com for more than $300 million. Hughes stayed on for a few years. In one stunt, which made it to the Wall Street Journal, he made branded urinal screens. (“Don’t piss half your money away, head to Half.com.”)

TiVoing forward a few years, we find Hughes in the enviable position of being both very rich and ideally situated in the fastest growing segment of the marketing business. Companies hire his Buzzmarketing to think up new ideas, ideas that will attract media, that will get people talking, that won’t break the bank. Hughes inked an exclusive contract with a large fortune-cookie manufacturer to print ads on the backs of fortunes; he prints messages on peanut vendor bags and wristbands. “My dad won a Pulitzer,” Hughes muses, with a chuckle. “Sometimes we talk about what I do and we just laugh.”

There is a yearning beneath Hughes’s apparent contentment, however. He is not a money guy; few nerds or marketing heads are. Hughes is in it, to borrow a term from his book, to “climb Buzz Everest.”

“Buzz Everest” is a chapter inspired by a guy named Don Price, a 71-year-old Wawa consultant whom Hughes met while the two were walking their dogs around the Swarthmore campus. One day, via word of mouth, Hughes learned Price was the man behind tie-dye.

Before there had been dot-coms to defect to, Price had been a bored marketer. It was the mid-’60s, and he was languishing at Hellmann’s mayonnaise, the most successful brand in New Jersey’s Best Foods packaged-goods conglomerate. After asking his bosses for a new challenge, Price found himself at Rit Dye, a tiny label in a shrinking market. When he visited the plant, the chemists seemed sure it would be shutting down. He asked what uses Rit might have that hadn’t been tapped into, and someone mentioned tie-dye, an obscure fabric coloring process used in India and Africa. It caught Price’s imagination.
“But you see, I didn’t have much patience, so I just scrunched a bunch of rubber bands around the piece of fabric, trying to get it to dry faster,” Price explained. “And I came out with this … blotch.”