Isabella and Carl looked at the wall of scribbles and colors in front of them.

Carl didn’t know this, but Isabella was obsessed with graffiti. As a teenager she had always looked with fascination at the new urban trend of tagging and spraying obsolete – or less obsolete – pieces of concrete and other structures. Most of that fascination was of course motivated by her parents’ undervaluation of the phenomenon, but part of it was caused by the fact that she intuitively knew graffiti carried meaning, although she had no idea what that meaning was. It was a language she didn’t understand. Later, she understood it had to do with identity, and presence. She also understood that while a lot of people loathed it, most people didn’t really care. It was her strong believe that – however beautiful – as a means of communication, graffiti wasn’t very efficient.

“They’re messages,” she began. “Not for us, of course, but messages nonetheless. Status updates. Tweets written on concrete. They sit there, and hope the receiver accidentally passes by and picks them up. But most of the passers-by are just oblivious, or maybe even annoyed. It’s tragic in some way,” she pondered.

“Yet, this is the exact same fate of a lot of advertisement. Even today. Even using a medium that is the exact opposite of concrete.” She felt philosophical now.

“We don’t really care about annoyance.” Carl countered. “On the contrary, annoyance can be a Good Thing.”

“Perhaps. But you do care about oblivion. It accounts for the huge waste in the marketing process. It’s disappointing, really. I started my studies in the internet pioneering era, when terms like connect, communicate, collaborate were still buzz words for future technology. We had no idea what was going to happen. And now we live in a society where mass media have evolved from one way television broadcast to an intricate network where literally everyone connects, communicates and collaborates with everyone. Yet the current holy grail of advertisement still is nothing more than broadcasting.” She stopped her rant to catch her breath.

“Television broadcasting is only successful because it shoots at millions at the same time. Targeted ads and banners on high traffic websites are less wasteful, but still are broadcasts. And in a way, so are virals! But think about how many people see those ads and don’t care at all. Such a waste. That waste is the true holy grail. Not the rat race for the next viral.”

“So what do you suggest then?” Carl inquired.

“Don’t broadcast. Communicate. Go back to basics. Our current technology almost asks for it.”

“Basics?”

“You agree that the best marketing strategy is word-of-mouth?” she asked him.

“Always been.”

“Well. Rather than trying to maximize response by broadcasting to millions and hope these millions will broadcast to other millions, my method goes back to the basics of word of mouth. One on one conversation. Using mass media in an ultra-private manner.”

“I’m listening.”

“We step away from conversion rates and applause rates and amplification rates. Our magnets will follow a completely different strategy. They build their network, they interact with their friends, they comment on their status updates.
They talk with them all the time. About everything. They behave like you and me, with the only difference that they don’t sleep and they can truly multitask.
That is their first objective. Make friends. Hang out. Have conversation.”

She stepped back and forth, gesturing heavily, using all of her body to make her point.

“And they record everything they talk about, and what their friends talk about. Every interaction. That’s their second objective. They collect data. We’ll use that data to refine our predictive analysis tools.”

She looked at Carl to see if he was still following. She was reaching the conclusion of her three-day sales pitch and she was terrified she would lose him now. She found him looking back at her, curious and most importantly, fully engaged.

“They’ll use that analysis to carefully select who they target for – let’s say, – more biased conversation where they casually slip in the product or a service of our paying customers. They’ll only do it with people who have been flagged as likely buyers of that product. Or who are flagged as merely interested. We can stratify our target groups if necessary. That’s…”

“That’s their third objective then?” Carl preempted her. “They sell.”

Isabella realized she got carried away. She calmed down and collected her rational, scientific self again.

“That is their ultimate objective, yes. The other two are just instrumental. The goal of advertising is selling stuff, isn’t it?”

There was a fourth objective, but she wasn’t going to tell him just yet. She was convinced it would even be possible to pinpoint the ones who could be manipulated into buying a product. In the same way a friend could talk you into that last beer in the pub when you should actually have gone home hours ago. She knew Carl well enough to know that his ethics wouldn’t conflict at all with this Machiavellian application of her software, but she sensed that Objective Four better could wait for another time.

Carl nodded.

“Ingenious. And utterly creepy. I take it you’ve completed that software?” he probed, his eyes fixed on hers.

Isabella confessed, “Just the fundamentals…I developed the basic functionality during my sabbatical.”

“But not the whistles. I get it, Bella. You are clearly passionate about this, but you wanted to prove it worked first. I admire the discipline. You’ve been keeping this idea under wraps all this time?” It was the first time he called her Bella. He flashed a smile of comprehension at her inaudible “yes” and finished her thought.

He told her what a genius she was. When it came out of him it did so unbidden, teasing a tear from the corner of her eye that beaded down the side of her face. That was the origin of “genius” to which he later added “social”, his second favorite euphemism for her.

“Why hasn’t anyone else thought of it?”

“I don’t know. I guess they should have. They probably did. Too late now. This will be our market. I mean exclusively, Carl! And we’ll stay in the lead if—”

“So, are you offering me a partnership?” he interrupted her , smiling, his eyes saying I will accept nothing less, darling!

—

Rostam felt priviliged. Fresh from university, he was recruited by Dr. Thorne and although he had had his doubts about fulfilling an internship at a start-up no one had ever heard about, he soon learned that he wasn’t only learning about cutting edge language technology; he was creating it. Two years after joining Dr. Thorne’s lab techs, he had given Anna phenomenal language skills and he was in charge of the speech project now. In his mind, there was no doubt as to where his loyalties lay. He therefore felt it his obligation to inform Dr. Thorne immediately about the serious protocol breach he had just discovered.

Entering the board room, he wasn’t surprised to see Dr. Thorne and Mr. Dunney standing opposite each other, a little too close. The winter look in Dr. Thorne’s eyes competed with Carl’s hot and restrained anger. They broke out of their staring contest and faced him simultaneously. Rostam felt very small and very unwelcome.

“Dr. Thorne…I…Sorry to interrupt? Could I have a word? I found some irregularities in our access logs? I’m afraid something is very wrong with our…” he tried.

“NOT NOW!” Carl barked at him. “Sod off! Dr. Thorne and I are having a private conversation here,” he added rather condescendingly. Whatever was going on there, it was clearly way out of Rostam’s league.

Rostam backed off and closed the door behind him.

“Here’s what we’re gonna do, Bella,” he overheard Carl hiss at her. “We’re THIS close to getting more funding. So you get over yourself and you sit and you look proud and excited and whatnot. Whatever it is you think I did, zip it! Am I clear?”

It was very rare for Carl to pull rank. Rostam had seen him do it once with one of the newer marketing guys, but never ever with his own business partner. It scared him. He suddenly wished he had never seen those logs.