The current hue and cry over online ad targeting should be of no great surprise to any student of history. Start with anything that’s widely used, but poorly understood, place it largely outside the control of your average citizen, then tell those citizens that this mysterious thing is actually good for them, and you’ve got a fine recipe for hysteria. See, for instance, the backlash against water fluoridation in the 1950s.

I try to keep history in mind when I encounter the inflated rhetoric that’s begun to attach itself to ad targeting. The Wall Street Journal ran a series on ad targeting a series describing the technique as “spying on users” (and I’m sure, given their high moral stance, that you will not be the target of any ad cookies while reading the article online). An Ad Age Digital columnist wrote a breathless account of the pants ad that “stalked” him. A Google search on “ad targeting” and “creepy” returns 3,150 results (though to put that in perspective, a search on “Lindsay Lohan’s dad” and “creepy” returns more than 80,000 results.)

I think these complaints miss the mark. Yes, consumers get annoyed when an ad follows them like a deranged stray cat. But it’s not because the ad is creepy. It’s because the ad sucks.

It’s true; I’m grinding my content marketing axe once again. We’re living in an era in which consumers are in a position to demand better content from brands, and retargeted ads rarely deliver. As an industry, we burn all of our mental calories trying to figure out which behaviors to target and how, and we give little thought to how it feels to be followed around by the same plain-vanilla ad day in and day out.

The usual defense of targeting is that it delivers more relevance to the consumer. And it does. If I’ve bought fishing gear on the Orvis site before, Orvis is right to assume that I’m a good prospect for more gear, and to serve me targeted ads on other sites. But do I need to see more ads telling me that Orvis has fishing gear? Um, no; I’m clear on the whole fishing thing. By treating me like a slot machine that has to be fed quarters, they’re missing a great opportunity to pique my loyalty with rich brand experiences, fishing tips, videos, destination ideas, etc. It’s easy for me to imagine being delighted by the sight of an Orvis ad, if only the content seemed to care about me.

If bad creative is the wound, then frequency is the salt being rubbed into it. Even the best creative cannot overcome this problem. I love the music of Sufjan Stevens, for instance, but if he were to follow me around all day and night, warbling like a wandering troubadour, I would quickly develop a headache. Eventually I would try to back over him in the driveway. What chance does a saturated ad have?

Right now, I’m being followed by a single childcare ad that has appeared to me literally thousands of times on dozens of sites. It would be very easy, in any ad server, to set an optimal frequency cap to prevent this headache-inducing waste. Yet many advertisers seem willing to follow the same prospects ad nauseam, reasoning that it’s worth a little annoyance to eke out better performance.

Folks, it’s not worth it. We’ve brought on the ire of the FTC by pummeling people with boring ads. It’s not that simple, you’ll say. It’s about privacy, transparency, control, etc, etc. Nah; it’s because the ads suck. I give up all sorts of personal data without hesitation when I install apps on my phone, because the apps delight me; they’re fun. When was the last time an online ad delighted you?

If I’m wrong, prove it. Spend a little more on creative in your next retargeting campaign, or convince your client to do so. Put some really different stuff out there. Give consumers some content they can care about, and keep it fresh. Then run a pre-post survey and see how those consumers feel about being followed.

Here in Portland, we still don’t have fluoride in our water. If online ad targeting goes the same way, we’ll have a cavity-prone generation being force-fed mass-market ads. Don’t they have it tough enough? Change starts with you, Orvis. I’m waiting.

In my forthcoming book on game theory and social media marketing (See how I slipped a mention of my book in there? Bet you hardly noticed. That’s called contextual marketing. It works because it’s subtle.), I set out to prove that game theory has something to teach us about how the testy relationship between marketers and consumers has evolved online over the last decade. In fact, game theory worked so well in analyzing this conflict that I now use it to analyze all conflicts, including why my neighbor insists on heaving his dead Christmas tree into the alley behind my house every year.

And since all marketing and no fun makes Eric a dull blogger (it’s one of the factors, anyway), I thought I’d set out to prove just how fun game theory can be by demonstrating its relevance to Battlestar Galactica, Season 3, Episode 6: A Measure of Salvation. Yes, it is actually possible to out-geek sci-fi.

I know, I know, the show ended like three years ago. I fully admit that I am late to the cause of BSG’s greatness, but I am filled with the evangelistic fervor of the recently converted. In the episode in question, the humans, who have been relentlessly pursued by the Cylons throughout the series, stumble upon biological weapons that have the potential to destroy the Cylons for good. These weapons are, in fact, diseased Cylons captured by the humans. When Cylons are killed, they are automatically “resurrected” among their own kind, so executing the captured Cylons would cause them to transmit the disease to other Cylons, setting off a chain reaction that could wipe out their species.

I’ll spare you a recap of the many brooding conversations that precede the humans’ decision to use the biological weapons; the upshot is that they use the weapons, or attempt to, and it is this decision that stirred me from the couch and prompted me to write this post, convinced as I am that game theory would have led them down a different decision path entirely.

This actually isn’t much of a stretch. Game theory was originally developed to analyze geopolitical conflict in the Cold War, especially in regard to the use of potentially world-ending nuclear weapons. As you may have heard, we didn’t end up launching any nuclear weapons in the Cold War, but they were very useful anyway in the practice of deterrence, which was basically a matter of convincing the other side that you had the weapons and were willing to use them, so that you wouldn’t have to use them. If you think deterrence worked out better for us than the grim alternative, then you have the original game theorists (partly) to thank for it.

Deterrence, I’m suggesting, is the other option available to the humans on BSG, though it’s never discussed – it’s all a lot of hand-wringing and should-we-or-shouldn’t-we. But it’s a real option. In game theory, the most basic conflicts are analyzed in terms of two options: cooperation (pursuing self-interest that aligns with your opponent’s self interest) and defection (pursuing self-interest that is contrary to your opponent’s self-interest). Self-interest is always a given; we are not altruists when it comes to our survival.

Deterrence is an interesting gambit: it is a form of cooperation with a strong threat of defection. You are demonstrating to your opponent that you’re more than willing to defect in the next round if they don’t immediately cooperate, and you have to be willing to follow through on that threat in order for future deterrence to carry any weight. In iterative conflicts –the Cylon-human conflict has been repeated for five seasons – deterrence often emerges because the cost of defection is very high, as both sides engage in a downward spiral of bloodletting.

By Season Three of BSG, both sides are sick of the fight, but neither trusts the other enough to cooperate; each believes the other will always end up defecting. The decision to use the biological weapons threatens to worsen the downward spiral. Since it is implausible that the weapons would succeed in wiping out all of the Cylons, the humans would then face a decimated foe that believes the humans are capable of anything and must be destroyed at all costs.

Using the weapons would have a positive outcome for the humans in the short run, but in the long run the outcome would be irreversibly bad for all concerned. This is a classic game theory dilemma: weighing the cost of an action that produces a short-term win against the risk of a long-term loss.

The humans and the Cylons find themselves in this dilemma because they both violated, from the other’s point of view, a cardinal rule of game theory in iterative conflicts: Never be the first to defect. The Cylons’ preemptive strike against the humans, which destroyed most of civilization, convinced the humans that the Cylons want nothing more than their total annihilation. And the Cylons claimed that they attacked in the first place because the humans’ willingness to destroy their own creation – the Cylons – proved they could never be trusted. When both opening moves are defection, cooperation is nearly impossible to achieve.

But deterrence offers a possible way out: it is a way of signaling that you are capable of inflicting a devastating act of defection, but you choose to cooperate instead, and so it engenders a degree of trust. On BSG, deterrence could involve making the Cylons aware that the humans possess the biological weapons and have the means to keep them safe until they can be used (it’s been established that the diseased Cylons can be kept alive, though not cured, with medication). The humans would only use the weapons if the Cylons defected, thus preserving their potency as a deterrent. If the humans could continue to wield the deterrence with some authority, a fragile truce could take hold.

Easier said than done, both in life and on BSG. Game theory analysis assumes perfectly rational action, and the chief proponents of using the biological weapons, Admiral Adama and his son, both have major daddy issues that cloud their judgment. Remind you of any recent office-holders? The final decision-maker, President Roslin, is locked into a story arc that includes an authoritarian streak running through her mother-hen persona. And how much fun would a show about deterrence be?

The point is, well, the point is I love me some BSG. But the other point is that deterrence is too often the option we overlook, because we’re drawn to the unhealthy extremes of either doing everything or doing nothing. The middle path is rocky. But the fate of humanity lies in the balance. So say we all.

The following is an excerpt from Chapter Three of my forthcoming book: Social Media Marketing: A Game Theory Perspective, to be published by Springer in June 2010. For more excerpts, updates, an opinions on game theory and social media marketing, follow me on Twitter @unsettler, or email me at eanderson@whitehorse.com.

It all began innocently enough, with a fuzzy rectangular graphic perched atop a Hotwired.com page on October 25, 1994. The world’s first banner ad read, “Have you ever clicked your mouse right here? YOU WILL.”With stunning prescience, AT&T had extended to the Web its popular “You Will” campaign, which predicted future consumer technology, into a prediction that users would blindly click on a banner ad that offered nothing specific in return (D’Angelo). Remarkably, users did click, and that first click set Web marketing down a zero-sum path from which it is only now recovering. For nearly a decade, the click was all that mattered. It was a measurable action that brought the user in direct contact with the offer. In other words, it most closely resembled the zero-sum game of direct mail, with even better measurability. And because banner ads could be switched out easily, the ability to improve the minimax point through randomization was vastly simplified, if often overlooked.

The obvious problem is that banner ads are only partly like direct mail. For the most part, direct mail’s practical purpose is simply to get consumers to respond. If the consumer throws the envelope unopened in the trash, it accomplishes nothing. But banners could do more. As with print and broadcast advertising, the banner appears alongside free or subsidized consumer content and helps to offset its cost. As in these other media, consumers can absorb a “brand impression” while they focus on other content.

And marketers generally agree, though they may lack the game theory framework to describe it, that a brand impression sits outside of the zero-sum game. Branding is not directly transactional; it demands no immediate action by the consumer, allowing instead for the cumulative impact of repeat exposure. In its purest form, branding is a form of cooperation, inviting the consumer to participate emotionally in defining the product’s meaning. The brand marketer seeks a long-term relationship that depends on consumer goodwill in a way that direct response marketing does not.

There’ll be more on where branding fits in to game theory later. The point here is that banner advertising stood at those divergent paths from the start, and it took the path more travelled, consigning itself, perhaps forever, to the realm of direct response. The allure was irresistible: here was a medium that offered immediate, highly measurable feedback on its effectiveness, allowing the marketer to track the actual value of a given ad and media placement.

If marketers had known how that value would fluctuate, they might have chosen a different path for the medium from the start. Recall the previous axiom that any single direct market technique over a long enough span of time will produce an inexorable shift in the equilibrium point toward the consumer. It’s also axiomatic that marketers will chase their losses with more aggressive direct response tactics, producing short term gains but ultimately making a bad situation worse.

And that is, in essence, what happened to banner advertising. Fearful of missing out on the next big thing, advertisers threw money at the Web. Publishers, trying to gain dominance quickly in the race to monetize content online, obligingly raised rates. In 1998, advertisers could expect to pay an average of $37 for every 1,000 impressions (Morgan Stanley Dean Witter), which was made digestible only by the 1-2% response rates that the ads still commanded.

But from 1998 onward, that response rate slid. To sate advertisers’ appetite for impressions, publishers began saturating their content with ads. When Microsoft’s car-shopping portal, Carpoint, debuted in 1997, there were no ads on its home page. By 2001, there were at least eight, not including sponsored links and pop-ups. As a matter of simple mathematics – even the most willing user can only click on one ad at a time – click-through rates declined accordingly.

But there were other factors that hastened the decline. The most obvious is the axiomatic one: consumers in a zero-sum game become inured to marketer’s tactics over time. Tactics that produced incremental gains quickly become overused dogma, whereupon they become ineffective. Because advertisers now had to compete for eyeballs in much bigger arenas, their methods became increasingly intrusive and deceptive: strobing ads, fake interfaces, and ads camouflaged as real content.

The most notorious example, still spoken of ruefully among Web marketers, is Treeloot.com’s “PUNCH THE MONKEY AND WIN 20 BUCKS” ad, which invited the user to brandish a virtual boxing glove to punch a virtual monkey. Millions of users were duped into clicking, only to discover that they’d won 20 “banana bucks” that could be parlayed into real money only by playing even more games. The ad was so often decried by the industry’s doomsayers that some still hold it accountable for the near-death of the medium.

The truly tragic aspect of the direction that Web advertising went is that marketers saw the writing on the wall very quickly. From its debut in 1999, the Web marketing forum Clickz began fretting about the industry’s over-emphasis on direct response, believing it would lead to a crash. Topics covered the first year included “Escaping the Cult of the Click-Throughs” (Graham 1999), “Tracking Non-Click Conversions,” and “Between a Rock and a Hard Place,” which contained the quaint observation that click-through rates were “at an all-time low” (Hespos 1999). (The average response has since declined another 500%.)

It’s easy to be smug about the inevitable consequences of the new medium’s direct-response myopia, but in truth individual marketers were simply powerless to invert the widely accepted perception that banner advertising’s primary function was as a direct response medium. The industry produced study after study showing how exposure to banner ads increased brand awareness by some measurable delta. The Internet Advertising Bureau was formed mainly to advance that agenda, by standardizing ad sizes around more brand-friendly specifications and running studies on the impact of rich media. Certainly the evidence was persuasive, but it didn’t matter, because of another axiom: given the choice between hard and soft data, marketers will always choose hard. So unless the entire industry simultaneously stopped measuring click-throughs, it remained the only metric universally accepted as an indicator of campaign performance.

Then the crash came. Advertisers were more or less content to throw bad money after good in banner advertising as long as the Internet economy was strong. But when dot-coms started to bomb with greater intensity in late 2000, dragging the rest of the economy with them, online ad money dried up overnight. Start-up online media companies canceled IPOs, and public ones like rivals Avenue A and Doubleclick watched their value vanish. The mainstream media wasted no time in declaring the era of online advertising well over, and the Web’s ad volume shrank for the first time since its inception. It remained in decline for nearly two years.

In retrospect, it seems unfair that Web marketing was sent into the desert like a scapegoat, carrying marketers’ sins on its back. To this day Web marketers still complain, and quite justifiably, that the level of accountability between online and offline advertising is badly misaligned. We still argue about brand impact and still tout statistics to persuade advertisers to accept other metrics. But none of that really matters when we look at this story through the coolly objective eyes of the game theorist. Web advertising went the zero-sum route, and zero-sum is what it got. Its zero-sum mathematics went the only direction such mathematics can: the minimax point shifted toward the consumer. But it’s also true in game theory that that which does not kill us helps us find equilibrium, and that’s what happened here.

Interestingly, at least one business journalist observed the relationship between game theory and banner advertising’s race to the bottom early on. In a piece for Business World entitled, “The Unbearable Lightness of Ad Revenue,” Frank Yu declared, “Ad budgets are a zero-sum game and so are users’ attention spans.” He predicted that as “jaded, cynical consumers” learned to tune ads out, only the top content providers could afford to stay in the game, and severe “clustering” of content and media revenue would occur. He further predicted that new platforms like PDAs would challenge the Web and force new content monetization models (Yu).

Yu was at least partly prescient, if too cynical. Web traffic did indeed cluster around top content providers, but smaller players were able to stay in the game as a result of the Web’s transparency. Media planning tools like Nielsen Online (formerly Nielsen NetRatings) were able to ascertain the dimensions of the audience on more niche sites and allow advertisers to trade volume for relevance. The predicted changes brought on by new platforms are only now beginning to occur, with marketers taking notice of the growth of mobile applications as a small but rising threat to the now-traditional online advertising model. But the fundamental problem Wu raises – that of consumers tuning out – remains the industry’s greatest challenge.

What truly saved Web advertising was the equilibrium that occurred between response rates and media costs. While the minimax point shifted inexorably toward the once-bitten-twice-shy consumer during this period, the industry survived because the cost model shifted too. The cost has stabilized around a proportional rate of return that direct-response marketers can live with; in other words, the cost of impressions dropped alongside the rate of response. This has, in turn, eradicated most of the least tolerable tactics. Pop-under ads are largely a thing of the past, and fake interactions are mostly passé.

The limitations of this outcome are the same as they are for Sierra Trading Post: a more stable zero-sum game is still a zero-sum game. It leaves marketers with the basic problem of trying to eke out performance gains from a medium that is shifting inexorably away from direct consumer engagement. The stark reality of this marketer-consumer relationship was made plain by a 2007 study that sent shock waves through the digital marketing community. A joint study by media research company Comscore and media agency Starcom showed that a stunning 50% of all clicks on banner ads came from one small slice of the Web population: Web users aged 25-44 with a household income of less than $40,000 per year. Dubbed “Natural Born Clickers,” these users spend four times more time online than average users but purchase products at significantly lower frequency. Such users tend to favor gambling, employment, and auction sites – a much narrower pattern of surfing behavior than the Web population as a whole. A 2009 update to the study showed that the minimax point was continuing to slide. The percentage of monthly clickers fell from 32 percent in July 2007 to 16 percent in March 2009, with only 8% of Web users accounting for 85% of clicks (Comscore 2009).

From a game theory perspective, the implication of the “Natural Born Clickers” phenomenon is that it undermines the precarious equilibrium in click-based banner advertising. That equilibrium is based on the idea that the cost of finding and prompting action from the right targets compensates for banner advertising’s low response rate. If, however, that low rate of response also falls short of finding the right targets, the advertiser is no longer in equilibrium. Advertisers are then paying too much for the wrong kind of results.

Obviously the industry is in need of a game-changer – a shift in the use of the medium that moves it outside of the stark give-and-take of zero-sum. Fortunately for the banner ad medium, that game-changer has come in the form of more advanced metrics that account for the effects of advertising beyond direct response. Any of us can recall an instance of having seen an ad or a series of ads and having some later decision, e.g., which cars to research, informed by those previous impressions. This is, in fact, the way that advertising has always been understood to work: as one of many factors that add up to a purchase decision. Banner advertising, by contrast, had been operating under the fallacy that only a direct and immediate action, irrespective of whatever else the user might be doing, is the only way to account for the ad’s impact. Such an outrageous supposition easily leads to the Natural Born Clickers phenomenon, as clicking on an ad bears the lowest cost for a user who is at their leisure and has no intention of purchasing.

But the advent of advanced metrics disposes of this fallacy. Advertisers can now account for “view-throughs” of an ad, i.e., the perfectly natural phenomenon of a user seeing an ad and responding later. In rich media advertising, one can now account for interaction with the ad – certainly important in making a brand impression – as well as the brand impact of the ad. And banner advertising can be evaluated for its contribution to sales rather than to the fallacious clicks metric.

The digital marketer might rightfully protest that no other advertising medium is required to justify its existence in this way; it is the equivalent of demanding that billboard advertising account for consumers that spotted the sign and then later went to the store and purchased the advertised item. But again, game theory provides a ready explanation: once the payoffs in a game have been established, no single player can unilaterally change the rules. No bottom-line focused marketer wishes to give up hard metrics in favor of more logically persuasive but softer arguments concerning brand impact.

This is precisely why the advent of social media marketing is so important to the health of digital marketing as a whole: it provides the game-changer that demands different metrics, none of them easily obtainable, for how online conversations with consumers impact brand relationships. When viewed in the context of (as opposed to in conflict with) now-traditional tactics like banner advertising, social media marketing becomes a way of continuing a conversation that may be initiated in traditional ways.

How precisely social media marketing works in symbiosis with other forms of advertising is a topic for a later chapter. The main point of recounting banner advertising’s tumultuous journey is that its evolution away from direct response and toward a more nuanced role has led the way for more radical evolutionary stages represented by social media. And that evolution is reflected in the numbers: while marketers’ investment in banner advertising dipped, then stabilized, at a fraction of its former value, their total investment in the Web has grown year over year. This has occurred because interactive media has begun, albeit slowly and with no shortage of false starts, to offer a way out of the zero-sum game of direct-response marketing. The chapters that follow will demonstrate how zero-sum has evolved into more complex gaming scenarios that involve varying degrees of cooperation. These games offer an alternative to the uneasy truce of mutually assured destruction and pave the way toward a very different future for both players.

The news this week that digital behemoth 360i has been snapped up by agency uber-behemoth Dentsu will no doubt be seen by industry soothsayers as yet another sign that the era of the independent digital agency is drawing to a close. That empty prognostication has been trotted out on a near-daily basis in the industry press nearly since the birth of digital agencies 15 years ago, and it’s no truer now than it was then. So I’d like to offer this by way of preemptive rebuttal: HA!

OK, I have a little more to say than that. What’s troubling to me from the perspective of a fiercely independent digital shop – an apparent dinosaur wandering bewilderedly among the mammals, if the industry press is to be believed – is not the acquisition itself, or others like it. (Mazel tov to you, 360i! May your balance sheet grow ever-longer!) No, what’s troubling is the attitude in the industry – and, let’s face it, among many clients and prospects – that these acquisitions are like missing Lego® pieces that have been snapped together to form some beautiful creation, magically filling out an agency’s capabilities so that they can now truly do anything. Again I say, HA!

The reality is that agencies that have grown through acquisitions have, in most cases, only truly integrated their balance sheets, not their capabilities. More and more, the role of uber-behemoths like Dentsu is simply to acquire, not to define – they no longer stand for anything in particular, and how could they, with so many distinct cultures and capabilities all folded under one umbrella? But when industry standing is defined by size alone – as Ad Age does, however benignly, with its Top 100 index – then it creates easy misperceptions about what you’re getting when you hire a big shop.

Take Sapient, for instance – recently listed among the top five digital agencies. To those of us who grew up as digital agencies, Sapient’s late arrival is like watching an oversized party-crasher bogart the keg. Weren’t they an IT consulting firm? No, no, because they acquired digital agency PGI in 2008. So they must be great at digital marketing by now, right? I ate a chocolate chip cookie at lunch today, so now I’m a Keebler elf.

Industry analyst Sean Corcoran, who covers digital agencies for Forrester Research, argues that in order to understand what an agency is good at, you have to look at their DNA – where they came from and how they grew. Companies that grew through acquisition have many different strands of DNA drifting through their systems. I don’t at all claim this as a reason not to hire them; I’m merely arguing that you should know what you’re getting. In many cases, a small to mid-sized agency that has organically developed a team of seasoned veterans may actually have a much deeper bench in a given area than an agency many times its size. Look to the DNA, people! Look to the DNA.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to the treehouse.

Is that too much to ask? Because it would really help out my agency, White Horse. Let me explain:

Did you ever read Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which the protagonist Arthur Dent—a very nice, well-intentioned guy—keeps inadvertently killing this hapless creature, Agrajag, over its multiple lifetimes, purely by chance? No, you didn’t read that? Anyway, it’s like we’re Agrajag, and you’re Arthur Dent.

OK, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, because you’re not killing us, you’re killing our efforts at getting top search ranking, and you’re not doing it so much as your insanely popular song, “White Horse,” is doing it. And since making Web sites more search-friendly is a small but important part of what we do for a living, well, you can see why our request for you to stop being famous is entirely reasonable.

It’s not easy being White Horse. We’ve already suffered unsavory comparisons to Portland’s thriving heroin scene and to the White Horse of the Apocalypse. And then there was that unfortunate period in our brand history in which horse puns like “solutions for the open range” were used freely, but then we brought that on ourselves.

But you, Taylor Swift, you brought this on us. Your song started climbing the charts right around the time we started to get search engine traction with our redesigned site. Then it showed up on Grey’s Anatomy, guaranteeing another surge of popularity among that show’s weepy fan base, very few of whom, I’m willing to bet, are in the market for Web services, so I can’t credit you with any cross-pollination there. And then there was the whole Grammy nomination.

How do I know so much about your song? Because there’s an entire friggin’ Wikipedia page devoted to it. There is no Wikipedia page devoted to White Horse, one of the nation’s oldest and most reputable digital agencies, because anything we put up there is deemed promotional by the site’s army of power-mad, deletion-happy volunteer editors, and of course there is nothing promotional whatsoever about being a pop diva.

There is, however, a Wikipedia page devoted to “white horse,” which states that it is a horse “with a white hair coat and mostly unpigmented (pink) skin.” So we’ve got that going for us.

And don’t even get me started about YouTube.

But in deference to our mutual financial stake in the popularity of white horses and the fact that even the greatest pop song can’t reign forever, I was prepared to bury the hatchet for the new year. Until today.

We just put out a press release for what promises to be a great little Webinar on social media monitoring for the healthcare industry, and I tapped our name into Google News today for the cheap, but dependable, thrill of seeing our release at the top of the heap. But no. We happened to have chosen the same day that Kelly Clarkson released a cover of “White Horse,” which apparently is a big damn deal because she looks like she’s riding your coattails. Take a number, Kelly.

But the last laugh will be mine, Taylor Swift. Not the ideal kind of last laugh, in which I roll around in a large pile of money after winning a bunch of music awards, but a laugh nonetheless, in which I swipe back some of your search traffic with a blog post devoted to you! Ha-ha! Yeah, that did make me feel a little better. Sort of.

To paraphrase one of the great cultural commentators of our time, in one of the great Internet memes of the bygone era of 2009: I’m happy for you, Taylor Swift, and I’m gonna let you finish, but White Horse is the greatest “White Horse” of all time! Of all time!!

Yes, it will. I may live to regret this claim if paid tweeting turns out instead to be a multi-billion-dollar contextual marketing ploy on the level of paid search, but I’m willing to take that chance. A report in the New York Times this week on the growth of paid tweeting was for me the canary in the coal mine (that pun was only slightly intended), signaling the potential ruin of not just Twitter, but of all social media marketing models that confuse word-of-mouth with being a paid mouthpiece.

The idea is for advertisers to identify relevant influencers on Twitter and pay them to slip the occasional sly endorsement in-between their itemization of their daily carb intake and their meta-commentary on the last episode of Gossip Girls. This presents obvious credibility problems for both the Twitter star and the brand being endorsed. It creates what economists refer to as a perverse incentive, i.e., the influencer is being influenced by the something other than his/her genuine love of the product, which in turn diminishes his influence and does nothing for the reputation of the product.

Consider the example—and I wish I could say I am making this up—of musician Ernie Halter’s Twitter endorsement of, yes, Cheese Doodles: “sponsored: yo! cheese doodles is giving away sweet prizes in the “rock the cheese” video contest. Check it!” Suffice it to say that neither the Cheese Doodle brand nor the Ernie Halter brand is elevated by such moments.

The money quote in the Times piece comes from the co-founder of a Twitter sponsorship service, who defends the practice by saying, “All we are trying to do is get consumers to become marketers for us.” Exactly the problem. Consumers are not marketers, and when consumers gush about brands they truly love in social media, their credibility comes from the fact that they are not marketers.

It is much, much harder work for brands (and their agencies) to build social media followings from scratch, and to build the kind of brand relationships that produce authentic word-of-mouth, but that is the task before us. And if anyone would like to make an unpaid endorsement of White Horse on Twitter, please use the following text: “yo! White Horse has mad skillz in the digital media and what-not. Check it!” Thank you.

The digital marketing press seems to be in a contrarian mood lately, especially when it comes to emerging media. In the last month, we’ve seen professional hits carried out against social media, influencer targeting, and now engagement tracking in rich media advertising. Is this some kind of nascent Luddite movement taking shape? Or maybe nostalgia for traditional advertising, prompted by the untimely and unfairly overshadowed death of infomercial pitchman Billy Mays? If this reactionary trend keeps up, we’ll all be buying prime time network broadcast space on B.J. & the Bear by the end of the summer.

In the latest salvo, no less esteemed an observer than Forrester Research has declared that “Marketers Should Ignore Engagement with Rich Media.” (No word on whether we should also ignore this whole “Internet” craze). Seemingly determined to throw the baby out with the bathwater, Forrester declares that the fact that engagement metrics are not yet standardized and not firmly tied to ROI means that the “promise of online measurement is mostly unfulfilled.”

I would argue that the opposite is true: the promise of online measurement is mostly overfulfilled. From our early reliance on the dreaded click-through rate to the current mania for social media ROI, we have lost sight of the fact that advertising is advertising. Its primary function is to drive awareness and engagement, becoming one of many, many myriad factors that drive traffic and produce sales. To the extent that rich media engagement metrics measure something much closer to what advertising is actually meant to do, it is a good thing. To the extent that it prompts marketers to build more interesting ads that do more, say more, and are more pleasing to consumers, it is a very good thing.

The Forrester article argues that ad engagement doesn’t necessarily increase the likelihood that the consumer will take a hard-ROI action like buying something. Very true. See The Purpose of Advertising as described above. But thanks to the magic of ad-serving technologies like Mediaplex (full disclosure: a White Horse technology partner), we can indeed determine a correlation. We can determine which high-engagement rich media ads also influenced sales, and we can optimize our campaigns accordingly. This is a vast improvement over the bad old days when click-through alone determined whether an ad drove action, and marketers resorted to ever-more charlatan-esque methods to induce users to click.

To be fair, Forrester’s not suggesting a reversion to CTR. They are suggesting that pre- and post- brand surveys are a more accurate measure of ad effectiveness. Not really. We use these surveys quite a bit at White Horse, and what they tell us is whether the target population was more aware of the brand/message after the campaign than before it and how their impression of the brand/message evolved. That’s only one dimension of an ad’s effectiveness; engagement is another. Engagement tells us down to a creative and placement level whether the ad was worthy of the consumer’s time, and presumably we can all agree that a consumer that interacts with an ad is also aware of the ad.

I relish being a contrarian more than your average marketer, but even I have to call a time-out on this. Let’s give these newer advanced tactics a little room to breathe. And if rich media execution and measurement seems overly daunting, well, then I’ve got your rich media advertising solution right here.

In the soft and squishy science that is marketing, it doesn’t take much to declare a trend. My own rule of thumb is to say that two seemingly related data points drifting past me in the cultural flotsam within one week of each other are enough to declare a full-blown Mega-Trend. And so I declare the trend of Influencer Demystification, whereby we marketers finally admit that we have glutted ourselves on an idea that, while tasty and filling, may be half-baked, and is therefore causing some gastrointestinal distress. I refer to the idea that mass marketing has now been replaced by the much more refined business of targeting key influencers.

The two data points that drifted past me (actually they were sent by colleagues who are more diligent than I am about watching the data stream) are the Harvard Business School study Do Friends Influence Purchases in a Social Network, and Brandweek’s interview with a research scientist on the Yahoo! payroll, amusingly titled “Scientist: Influencer Theory is Bogus” (well, as long as a scientist said so).

Both of these studies belong to the time-honored genre, Simmer Down Now, Marketers, in which we marketers take jibes at each other over how mistakenly excited we got about something. As a native Midwesterner, I’m genetically disposed to feeling that everyone needs to simmer down all the time, so I like this genre.

To summarize their respective arguments: the Harvard study showed that users on social networks fall into three categories in terms of how easily they’re influenced: The low-status group members (48%) aren’t heavy networkers and are not easily influenced. The high-status group members (12%) are super-connected and actually respond negatively to influence. But the soft creamy center, the middle-status group (40%), is moderately well-connected and shows a strong propensity to influence and to be influenced.

This cranky research scientist at Yahoo! is, by contrast, pretending to throw cold water on the whole concept of influence, claiming it lacks empirical data, but ultimately he’s promoting Yahoo!’s own set of empirical data–soon to be productized, no doubt–that shows that “the network attribute that was conducive to diffusion [of social influence] is: Easily influenced people influencing other easily influenced people” (emphasis mine). Hey, same conclusion as the Harvard study, just one week later! How ‘bout that!

I think this points to a very interesting idea: we get all worked up about finding the “alpha,” the uber-influencer who decides what’s cool for everybody else. But to the extent that these alphas exist, they’re not easily persuaded (indeed, perhaps negatively persuaded) by our marketing messages. But that soft, creamy center looks very appealing. The people in the center care about their status, and they work hard at staying current and connected. They easily flip roles between influencer and influenced within a single transaction: somebody sends them a funny video, and they send it on, pleased to be the “alpha” within their own network for people who hadn’t seen the video yet.

And that’s how the alpha thing really works. We’re not operating within one vast network of coolness here, where a bunch of permanent alphas define things for the rest of us: we as marketers are talking to a vast number of ever-shifting micro-communities of mutual influence, trying to get the message to the people most likely to care about it and pass it on. That target shifts with every product and every network, but defining the target in terms of connectedness is a good place to start. If you want to influence tea purchase, you target people who like tea and are moderately connected. Am I missing something about how the difficulty of doing this? Let me know.

A colleague at White Horse brought to my attention a recent screed by Matt Jones in Ad Age Digital, entitled “Why I Hate Social Media.” Let me tell you Why I Love this Article, despite the fact that as the head of White Horse’s emerging media practice, I’m hanging my hat on the continued growth of the very practices that Jones decries.

I’ve always been a fan of the shameless rhetorical gambit of taking an extreme position in order to bring the conversation back to center, and that is, in substance, what Jones has done. He ultimately argues for a measured and judicious use of social media to support traditional marketing tactics that start with better content. Rather than trying to retro-fit crappy content–stuff that no one wanted to look at when it was paid media–we ought to focus on doing more interesting work and letting the inscrutable laws of what’s worth sharing and what isn’t take effect. I think you’d have a tough time finding a social media strategist that would disagree with this logic.

I welcome arguments like Jones’ because I’ve worried for some time that social media marketing is due for a backlash (you’ll find this worry threaded throughout most of my past posts). We ought never to embrace social media as an end in itself, but only and always as a means of brand dialogue where and when such dialogue is meaningful. That’s probably stating the obvious, but take a look at some of the more parlous content that brands are Tweeting, just so they can be on Twitter, and tell me if those aren’t backlash clouds gathering on the horizon.

In a presentation on social media earlier in the year, I used the example of Ford, one of the top 10 brands in terms of social media presence, with over 90 million mentions in 2008 alone. Impressive? Yes, but that’s less than one-tenth of one percent of the impressions Ford allocated to paid online media in the same year. Paid media continues to get most of the budget, but very little strategic mindshare, because we’re all too busy going gooey over social media. Might a discussion around the integration of the two be useful? I think so, and so does Jones.

Call it self-justifying, but I believe that being a little jaundiced on social media helps me to be a better social media strategist; I owe it to my clients to look at their marketing budgets holistically and not chase after shiny objects. But my perspective is still different than Jones, who proposes that we ignore this phenomenon until the hype dies down. Instead, I borrow my social media philosophy from Woody Allen’s satirical essay on the French Existentialists, in which he professed that he hated reality but found it was the only place he could get a good steak. Social media is in many ways overblown, chaotic, and unreliable, but when it comes to true brand dialogue, it’s the only place you can get a good steak.

Day One

I came to Chile for an unmediated travel experience, in the true sense of the word: nothing in between. Nothing between the stranger and the strange land – no guides, no tours, no shuttles, no AAA-rated hotels.

A well-traveled colleague sent me an email the day I left for Chile, listing some ways to unmediate while traveling. One of the suggestions was, “Pet every dog that you find.” On my first day in Chile, I saw many, many dogs.

I didn’t manage to pet any of them; instead I killed one. More on that later.

Despite my desire to dig deep into the places I visit, I’m not all that adventurous by nature. I’m actually a bit soft. Combine that softness with a couple of mule-headed traits, namely, 1. I tend to believe I can do anything just by reading up on it, and 2. I don’t like to ask for help, and you’ve got a recipe for trouble.

The trouble started with turning 40. I was determined not to be a cliché, but what can I say, the big round number got to me. I figured if I actually referred to this as my Mid-Life Crisis Trip (MLCT), then I was being ironic about the cliché, and therefore, not being a cliché.

The fact is, I did feel the need to take stock, and to go somewhere that would help me do that. I wanted to observe 40 and not just turn 40. I considered a lot of options for the MLCT. Probably too many options. It came down to undertaking the current adventure or going on a Zen retreat.

Arguably a Zen retreat is ready-made for the Person Taking Stock, but in truth I thought I would be bored and annoyed by my fellow seekers, and I self-justified this choice with the old Zen chestnut, “It’s easy to be a holy man on a mountain.” This is really meant to convey that Zen should be a day-to-day lived experience, not a retreat from the world, but I have long used it to justify my laziness about adopting any kind of formal practice (see character flaws above). And I’m adopting it now to mean that if I can be Zen while hurling myself unmediated into Chile, I can be Zen anywhere. So far, not so good.

The core of the MLCT plan was to wrest control of my itinerary by driving. This is a bigger deal than it sounds. If you want to see any amount of the Chilean backcountry – like, say, the Andes – you must drive. (Unless you are one of those notoriously fit, apple-cheeked European backpackers on a 3-month “holiday,” which even then involves hitchhiking, which is cheating ). But Chileans have opted not to democratize the wilderness the way America has, where every slack-jawed yokel with a plug-in cooler can back their boat trailer up to within Skoal-spitting distance of any natural attraction. Much of Chile’s up-close natural beauty lies many molar-rattling miles up unmarked dirt roads, and they like it that way.

And so the beating, rattling heart of my Chilean adventure is a blood-red vintage Nissan pick-up truck, 111,141 miles and counting, which I rented from an authentic Chilean rent-a-car company, no mediation there, in order to save a few bucks (actually about 500 bucks) over Hertz et al. I don’t know the exact vintage of this truck, but the only feature that carbon-dates it to within the last 30 years is that it’s a Nissan and not a Datsun.

The A/C doesn’t work, it has a pronounced shudder over 80 kpm, and the clutch is fading fast, but after 36 hours of driving in Chile, I am profoundly grateful I have this truck and not some sleek little 3-cylinder bubble from Hertz, for one very simple reason: I have beat the hell out of this truck. At the airport, it takes the rental company guy 20 minutes to solemnly record all the scrapes and dings on its battered body in the manner of a crime scene investigator, and so I am confident that my own scrapes and dings are merely embossing the ones already there. In my quest for the Chilean backcountry experience, I have driven over roads that were little more than arroyos, bounced over half-buried boulders, ground the clutch down steep inclines, and been scraped by much exotic flora.

It started with the enchantingly named Siete Tazas, or the “Seven Teacups.” Any rational person would, after nearly 24 sleepless hours of airports and airplanes, faced with driving an unreliable vehicle in an unfamiliar country and with poor language skills even in the most lucid state, opt to drive the 200km straight to the first hostel and, you know, chill. But no. Siete Tazas is reputed to be one of Chile’s great natural wonders, a series of seven cascading pools carved by wind and water from the basalt, resembling one of those enormous champagne fountains popular at weddings. Plus unlike other Chilean natural attractions, it was a clearly marked exit from the Pan-American Highway. Too easy to pass up.

Not so easy. Siete Tazas lies 65km up a winding dirt road rutted by washouts and populated by a lush variety of free-range livestock. It takes nearly two hours to get there. Amazingly at the end of this end-of-the-earth road sits a lonely guard in a shack, patiently carving road signs by hand. I have my first multi-subject broken Spanish exchange with him, and I feel all native: Is the park open? Yes. Is fishing allowed? No (damn). Am I OK where I parked? Yes.

Siete Tazas is impressive. Is it worth it? I got some good pictures, and they say that pictures don’t do it justice. In a more poetic state I might say that a challenging journey to a place that may or may not be worth it is the point of the whole trip. The journey is the point, that is. But I’m not ready to embrace that notion yet.

I spent more time than I planned in Chilean towns and villages today, and so the culture shock has come on a little faster than expected. But that’s OK. I really believe you can learn a lot about a people from their rules of the road. For instance, I hate Boston. No explanation needed. I knew someone who selected Portland as a place to live over two other cities by examining how people reacted to her lingering too long at stop signs. (It’s true that in Portland, courtesy is the municipal past-time, but we don’t have a professional baseball team.)

Chileans would lay on the horn in the stop sign test, not because they’re impatient, but because they have a reputation for being officious. They expect everyone to follow the rules, and you’re going to hear about it if you don’t. On a rural highway I am flashed to turn down my high beams at least 8 times. My high beams are not on. The Chileans are just making sure.

It’s easy to miss this law-and-order mentality because the cities feel like stereotypical Latin chaos. I wind up in the provincial capital of Talca as the sun is setting and I search desperately for the seemingly unmarked rural highway that will take me the remaining 65km to my hostel. It feels like everyone is on the street and in the street, pedestrians holding sway over traffic and reason.

I am desperate to find my bearings before dark, with inadequate maps, no signage, and insufficient language skills to comprehend the answer to “Donde esta la autopista de San Clemente?” I finally have the sense to find a main thoroughfare and put the last scuds of daylight at my back, thereby aiming east, and by the apparent intercession of St. Clement himself, find the damn highway.

In the Chilean towns and villages there are many dogs of quasi-pet, semi-stray status, free-ranging but territorial, and they are fearless in traffic. One of these crosses in front of an SUV coming toward me up the road. The SUV strikes the dog full force, no brakes, sending it flying into the path of my car. I run over it with a sickening crunch. I keep driving.

So when I said at the beginning that I killed a dog in Chile, that might have been hyperbole, a shameless, desecration-of-the-dead attempt at dramatic contrast between the advice I have been given and what has occurred. I’d like to think the dog died instantly, before I even hit it. Probably. I might have stopped, I don’t even know how to stop, hemmed in by chaos. I guess my point is that when you go looking for culture shock you don’t get to adjust the shock level.

I find my rural retreat – up a dirt road, of course – and I haven’t felt that good to arrive somewhere since the night I hiked through a dark woods in a thunderstorm after losing my way while fishing.

Day Two

My first Chilean retreat is such a retreat that Chileans don’t seem to know about it. My bemused hosts inform me that I’m the first norteamericano to find the place on the Internet, as opposed to being guided there by the hobo lingo that passes between transcontinental backpackers. It is a remarkable place, 3 cabins carved into a remote wilderness area near the Argentine border called “Refugio Tricaheu.” It sits on several hundred hectares of private land set aside by a wealthy Chilean as a wildlife preserve.

The owners are a young Belgian couple, the sort of insanely capable and hardy Europeans who always seem to be carving something out of the wilderness. (Probably the result of pent-up energy from no longer being able to colonize things.) Standard amazing story: They biked here from Belgium, crossing from Sierre Leone to Brazil (no word on whether they crossed by ship, thereby allowing them to do laps), then across the Andes, stumbling upon this place one rainy night and deciding to settle here and build a hostel.

They’ve built the place with typical Flemish efficiency, no corners cut: Tightly constructed fir cabins, neatly lined gravel paths, solar showers, and of course, a Finnish sauna (which has a no-bathing-suit rule; way too European for me.) My room has a fiberglass panel above my bunk so I can watch the stars: first night, all clouds, but second night around 3am, wow.

They are almost painfully helpful, plotting out my day of fishing and hiking with detailed, hand-drawn maps. On my hike their dog accompanies me with an enthusiasm that suggests this is the greatest fucking thing he’s ever been invited to do, rather than the same thing he’s done for the last 900 days. So far I don’t seem to have brought on any Instant Dog Karma based on last night’s events.

In the evening I screw up my courage for my first official Chilean eating out experience. This is not your standard lonely-guy-reading-the-newspaper-at-the-table experience, which I was prepared for. In rural Chile, there aren’t so much “restaurants” as there are “places that will feed you,” as indicated by handpainted signs outside ramshackle houses offering “COMIDA.”

I show up at one of these houses and, surrounded by three generations of shyly curious Chileans, manage to convey in broken Spanish that I wish to eat, whereby an argument in Spanish ensues, settled by the abuela, who tells me to come back in an hour.

I do, and they seat me in a corrugated tin shed, where I and two little boys watch a dubbed movie about a racing zebra while the abuela brings food. It’s a four course meal with the densest bread known to man, a salad, and some kind of hominy beef stew. Fantastic. I sit there longer than I should, forgetting that the rules of courtesy in Latin cultures dictate that no one will settle up with you until you ask. When I finally do ask, the bill is three dollars and forty cents.

Day Three

Today is a travel day, which is to say, a long-ass drive. No longer able to avoid the three German backpacking women that have taken over the common area of the cabin, I sit and have breakfast with them. In fact they are completely charming and informative, with perfect English, and once again my deliberate effort to Make Myself Completely Uncomfortable by Eating with Strangers is rewarded. They have just come from Pucon, my next destination, and they are full of advice, drawing maps for me on the backs of tea bag wrappers. (Tea is a staple of the Chilean diet, owing to their extreme admiration of the English, and the three cups of coffee I’ve had since arriving have all been Nescafe instant.)

Most of my day is spent driving, which I had much romanticized in my MLCT planning, mostly to justify not splurging for a plane ticket to southern Chile. The driving experience on the Pan-American Highway is not culturally exotic. Much like U.S. highways, it traverses the least interesting parts of the landscape, and the culture built up beside it – gas stations, gift shops, and roadside restaurants – is an artificial one created for drivers. But after seven hours in the truck I can offer a few observations:

The Pan-American Highway in Chile is a very good stretch of road, rivaling the best in North America, but it is also extremely well-financed: I paid way more in tolls than I did for a night’s lodging at Refugio Tricahue. The social divide is maintained by this system, with most Chileans opting for the omni-present buses.

The speed limit is 120 kph, which my ancient truck has a very tough time maintaining, but it’s in good company: no one drives over the speed limit, and easily half of the drivers on the road are clocking in somewhere closer to 70-80 kph. In some cases, this can be explained by the condition of the vehicle, but in more cases than not, drivers appear to be simply choosing to go slow. This is incomprehensible to a norteamericano; I once lived with an Irish woman in Philadelphia who was pulled over and berated by a Jersey cop for driving 55 in a 65 zone.

The heartbreaking optimism of the stray dog, who believes that every car bearing down on him is coming to rescue and not to kill him, continues with alarming frequency. A beautiful black setter crosses the highway in front of me and ignores my frantic telepathy, “Please don’t double back, please don’t double back,” and doubles back, at which point I screech to a halt on thin tires in the middle of the fucking Pan-American Highway, but I don’t care, because I’ll be damned if I’ll let lightning strike twice. Probably the next car will kill him.

About 200 km outside of Pucon I come over a ridge to the jaw-dropping sight of a volcano in full eruption, a massive column of smoke billowing into the stratosphere. I later learn that this is Volcan Llaima in Parque Trinquilquo, the second eruption in this range in as many months. I opt not to stop for a picture, figuring the view will be better further on, and end up missing the shot altogether. There’s a lesson in that somewhere.

I arrive after dark at the Landhaus San Sebastian, a Hansel/Gretel-level picturesque farmhouse/guesthouse run by, yes, more uber-ambitious Europeans: a young German couple and their Austrian receptionist. It’s all carved wood, warm stoves, and baked strudel – cozy enough to make a weary traveler weep. Determined to push my Dining in the Company of Strangers regimen to the limit, I spend dinner chatting across the room with a pair of retired wine importers – he of British and she of German origin, now settled in Portugal.

Lest this seem a little too ex-pat to be an authentic Chilean experience, let me explain that the Germans have a long history in northern Patagonia. They came here in the 19th century at the invitation of the Chilean president, who hoped that sweet land deals and a Germanic climate would entice the Germans to, uh, inject an Aryan genetic strain into the Mapuche Indians in the area. The Germans stayed but mostly didn’t intermarry, so now there are Chileans, Germans, and Mapuche here.

Day Four

By day four I feel like I’ve got this fish-out-of-water thing down, language-wise, with my pidgin Spanish carrying me through so many awkward conversations that they’re no longer awkward. I breeze through gas stations, stores, and restaurants without understanding 80% of what’s said to me but somehow making the other 20% suffice. To complicate matters, I’m consistently mistaken for a Chilean for the first 5 seconds of every encounter, with my dark hair, beat-up truck, and, well, enthusiastic pronunciation of what few Spanish words I do know. Also I am apparently 1 of about 10 tourists left in Patagonia for the season, and the only one traveling solo.

Today it is seriously raining, and while I’ve been telling everyone that I can handle a little rain, cuz I’m from Oregon, this is the rain the locals call “La Lluvia Que El Oregonian Hace Deprimido ,” which translates as “The Rain that Makes Even the Oregonian Despair.”

But because flyfishing involves the kind of idiotic fanaticism that ignores bad weather, I head out for a local attraction, the “Ojos de Aburgua” or “Eyes of Aburgua,” a pair of waterfalls, figuring to eyeball the Eyeballs for awhile then fish above them. I do so, and I get my first (and second) Chilean trout, making me officially an international fly fisherman. I can report that the trout of Chile are every bit as taken with the trusty size 18 olive pheasant tail, friend to fly fishermen the world over, as are Oregon trout. But I’m kind of disappointed they didn’t go for something more exotic.

Back at the Landhaus I learn my guided fishing trip has been rained out, owing to the rising river levels which admittedly do make for bad fishing. Much like Portland with its brewpubs, there is one and only one thing to do here that is actually enhanced by bad weather: the termas or volcanic thermal baths. There are something like a dozen of these bath complexes studded along the volcanic valleys here, all offering a chance to forget your troubles with a good hot mineral soak that may also cure your nervous disorder, arthritis, gout, skin disease (yech), kidney disease, or ulcer.

I am normally not a fan of the whole spa thing – probably the lingering negative effects of a Catholic childhood. Something about the combination of luxury, relaxation, and partial nudity feels like trouble. But I figure this trip is all about doing things I wouldn’t normally do – which presents a much healthier set of choices in southern Chile than, say, Bangkok – so I pick the fanciest-sounding termas from the guidebook and head out.

I’m still amazed by how much of what there is to see and do in Chile – not just the natural attractions, but really fancy lodges, spas, and restaurants – lies at the end of many miles of rutted, flooded, and mudded roads of the kind that in Oregon usually lead to a meth lab or an abandoned logging camp or a meth lab in an abandoned logging camp. It doesn’t seem to hurt their business one bit, so I’m convinced it’s just a difference in semiotics: in the U.S., the quality of the road signifies that a place is worth visiting. If the road is bad, it means no one goes there, and it’s not worth your time. In Chile, a bad road makes a place more exclusive, and therefore of higher quality.

Which is to say that the Termas de Menetue, a spectacular structure of fir, granite, and feng shui, is a long way from nowhere down a very bad road. It has two indoor pools of greenish, steaming water in a massive pavilion with piped-in Pan flute music. I join a dozen or so dozing Chileans, all of us wearing the mandatory bright blue Menetue bath cap, so we look like a pool full of very festive Orthodox Jews.

And despite myself, I find that I’m getting into it. I’m kicked back with my Chilean hermanos, with life-giving steam wafting into my sinuses, listening to the patter of the rain, feeling my gout disappearing, and for extra effect, reading Luis Borges’ mind-bending Latin American classic Ficciones. If someone brought me a pisco sour right now, I’d probably have an out-of-body experience.

I swear if I could do this kind of thing in Oregon for 8 bucks, I’d be there every day.

Day Five

I now have the guesthouse entirely to myself, which is nice in a way but also has an eerie Wuthering Heights vibe about it. When I went downstairs to the main room to read last evening, the Austrian receptionist, the young fraulein, poked her head out of her door like a cuckoo clock and asked if she could help me. She didn’t seem to buy my explanation.

Thankfully the rain has stopped, and it’s nothin’ but blue skies from now on. I hit one of my main targets, Parque Herquehue, home of the ancient, endangered, exotic Aruacania tree. It’s hard to understand until you get here how a tree could be such a big attraction. But when you finally see one – for which you have to climb about 900 slippery switchbacks on a so-called “moderate” trail that kicked my un-acclimated ass but definitely added to the drama of the Big Tree Reveal – well, it’s really something.

In the afternoon, my fishing guide picks me up at the hotel. And lest my use of a fishing guide seems un-unmediated of me, let me point out that Mario (who has the biggest, blackest, bushiest mustache outside of central Bagdad) speaks no English whatsoever, so we are going to be getting primal, using the ancient language of fishing. On the ride to the river I teach him the norteamericano names for the flies he’s carrying, the “Wooly Bugger” and the “Egg-Sucking Leech.” He informs me that there will be no trout for us, oh no, because the coho salmon are in the river, so we’re going after the big boys.

I’m carrying my 5-weight as my main rod and my beloved feather-light 1-weight as a back-up, and Mario and his assistant are ogling my 1-weight as if it is a two-headed calf. Mario explains that in Chile, no one has ever seen a 1-weight, because the fish are mas grande, and I try unsuccessfully to convey that virtually no one in Oregon has seen one either, that I own it for the rios pequenos that I favor, but that listen, we have big fish too, which the 1-weight can handle no problemo. They are also amused by my small catch-and-release net and proudly display the big honkin one we’ll use to net the salmon, now that I’m about to become a man.

I definitely sense a machismo thing going on here.

We are drifting the eerily beautiful, mist-covered Liucura River, and I am flogging the water in the ancient futile rhythm of the salmon fisherman. Part of the reason I’m a trout guy and not a salmon guy, besides not being all hung up on size, is that you don’t so much fish for salmon as you do flail around for them. Migrating salmon don’t eat, so you’re not trying to match their food source as you do for trout. You’re basically trying to annoy the salmon with something big and flashy that triggers their strike instinct. It’s not unlike advertising.

Which is all a long way of saying we don’t catch any salmon. Well, neither does anyone else on the other drift boats (I think; anyway, I heard nada a lot). I do manage to snag two trout with the double-duty Wooly Bugger, which Mario refuses to haul in with the sacred salmon net. I’m eating my heart out about missing so many trout, which are partaking of the evening mayfly hatch with gusto – big splashy takes echoing down the river like a string of firecrackers. But when in Chile…

Day Six

Unmediated experiences keep falling in my lap. I wish I could take credit for seeking them out, but I can’t. I bow to the young fraulein’s truly relentless efforts to schedule activities for me (she’s either naturally helpful or she’s getting a cut of the action) and agree to a guided horseback ride up in the mountains. After yesterday’s hike, I’m ready to let a horse do the work.
Horses are a big deal here; the native Mapuche are serious equestrians, and the gaucho culture is alive and well in the mountain cattle ranches. (Also many rural Chileans don’t have cars and rely on horses to get around.) At this particular ranch, the owner Rodolpho is a local legend, a formal Olympic medalist in equestrian events and an authority on the high country. But Rodolpho has to go into town to pay taxes, so he proposes this instead: I should ride along with his two gauchos as they round up stray cattle in the mountains.

Neither the gauchos nor my horse speak any English, and my riding experience is, uh, limited. “Para no es primavera!” (not my first time) I insist to the gaucho who gently asks after seeing my terrified grin after one intense gallop.

But I’m game, and this turns out to be one of the coolest things I’ve ever done. We wind up and up the mountains through scrubby bamboo thickets near the tree line. The only thing more surreal than bamboo at this elevation (which my horse chows on at every opportunity) is the occasional steer poking his head out of it, looking as if it were the most natural thing in the world for him to have wandered up a couple thousand feet for a snack.

Cattle-wrangling is a very efficient system, and I could probably understand it better if my Spanish was better (I’d still like to know how the gauchos knew where to look for the cattle out of a couple thousand square miles of wilderness). But I can tell you this much: everybody – the gauchos, the cattle, the dogs, and the horses – understands their place in the system very well. When the gauchos find a steer, its reaction is something like, “Damn, busted,” and it moseys on down and joins the others. But occasionally a steer will bolt for the high ground, at which time the Jack Russell terriers spring into action and block its path of escape, barking furiously.

I’m telling you, the sight of a 15-pound terrier standing down an 800-pound steer with nothing but its bark is worth the price of a plane ticket to Chile.

We (by which I mean “they”) rounded up nine cattle and drove them down the mountain to the ranch.
I also fished today, and it was very good, almost confirming the stereotype of Chile as a place where you wet a line and catch a trout, but what’s fishing compared with gaucho-for-a-day. Chile has met me more than halfway, but I feel like I got it almost-exactly right.

Day Seven

Today was all about the fishing – I can’t lug all this gear the length of a hemisphere and not have one dedicated day of it. Problem is that the area’s prime fishing rivers – the Liucura and Trancura – are mainly a drift boat kind of deal, because shore access is mostly on private land. I lament this to the inn’s owner, who tells about a campground, closed for the season, just 1k up the road at the spot where the Caburgua and Triacura rivers converge.

Is there a prettier fishing spot on Earth? Probably, but I have not been there. About two miles of gin-clear trout water in a deep forest setting – this right here is the norteamericano fantasy of the Chile flyfishing experience.

I won’t make this into a fishing story, but suffice it to say this may have been the single best day of fishing of my life. And as so often happens in life, the high point and the low point come along right next to each other. Around noon I’m casting a streamer I’ve never tried before but which has been recommended for Chilean trout, a “Bitch Creek,” undoubtedly named for its usage after all other likely flies have been tried and found wanting, and I have no faith in this thing, just really reconnoitering with it, when suddenly a brown trout hammers it, and I know it’s a brown for its big strike and the fact that it’s staying low and thrashing, not taking to the air like a rainbow, and I somehow haul this thing in and it is one beautiful brown, and it’s at this point that I manage to royally screw things up.
I have a strict, self-imposed prohibition against photographing my catches, partly because it’s bad for the fish to have them out of the water for any length of time, and partly because I am so congenitally clumsy that it’s bad for me too, and partly because who really wants to look at fish pictures? But I figure I need a picture that says (to anyone that cares) that this is a Chilean trout, yessir, they grow them fat and pretty down here. So I snap the picture and the fish thrashes and I drop the camera right into the net, where it is exposed for several seconds to river water and a large thrashing trout. And so the camera is toast, and I hope and pray that six days of pictures are not likewise toast, but damn, that was a really nice fish.

I caught others; they were nice too.

Today’s other Major Cultural Experience was being pulled over by the carabineros, the national police, thereby bringing to fruition my longstanding dread of such an encounter. Unlike in many other Latin American countries, where the traveler is encouraged to settle the matter swiftly by offering a propina, a tip, the Chilean police pride themselves on going by the book, which will be vigorously thrown at you if you try to bribe them.

This turns out to be less stressful than cop-stops back home, which at least carry the threat of points against my license. The carabinero barks something in Spanish, which, if cops are more or less the same everywhere, is probably along the lines of, “Do you know why I pulled you over?” For once my limited Spanish is an asset; my “No entiendo” leaves him nonplussed, looking to his partner for help, and I helpfully extend my International Driving Permit by way of saying, Look how hard I’m trying to follow the rules here, and he barks “Luces!” (lights; I keep forgetting they’re required at all times here), and waves me on my way.

Day Eight

Last full day in Chile. After my fine showing of equestrianism in the cattle wrangling operation two days ago, I opt for a second dose, taking up an invitation from the young fraulein to go riding with her on the “dry” side (i.e., the leeward side) of Villarrica, the active volcano that dominates the local skyline. Our destination is a 300-hectare ranch bordering the national park and owned by a Chilean-German family for four generations. I’m angling to get a little more of the flora/fauna 411 on this outing, and the young fraulein is working that angle: I supply the ride, and she supplies the translation.

But it soon become clear that the fraulein has other angles as well – she’s obviously sweet on the ranch owner’s son, who’s taking us on this ride. She brings him a box of chocolates. They exchange lingering glances. She is uncharacteristically giddy for an Austrian. I am feeling a little like the third testicle on a mare.

So a lot of my hoped-for translation is lost in the flurry of throaty Germanic syllables passing between these young riders in the throes of mutual admiration. But that’s OK, because this is all pretty spectacular. We stop on the edge of a deep ravine containing an ashen river flowing from the volcano’s twin cinder cone. Things are panoramic. The 90 degrees left out of this billion-pesos view is occupied by a little refugio cabin so quaint I expect Heidi of the Hills and her grandfather to emerge at any moment. This belongs to the Chilean-German fellow’s family, and he proceeds to make things homey. He starts a fire and grills up a couple brats, and here I am chomping on a brat and ogling this postcard landscape while my horse grazes, and the only thing that would make this more perfect is… and what do you know, here comes the Chilean-German with a beer. I can die happy now.

On our way back to the ranch, our host points out what looks like a pile of logs nestled into the saplings. This is an old bunker, he explains, occupied by Chilean troops during a near-war with Argentina in the 70’s. (1978, I find out later; a minor dust-up over ownership of a couple of arctic islands). It’s my first visual marker, I realize, of the Chile I had known before coming here, the one from my college Latin American politics courses.

That Chile had its slender throat under the boot of a brutal military dictator, Auguste Pinochet, for 17 years. That Chile had its own 9/11, and there is no gentle way to say this: my country sponsored the terrorist act. On September 11, 1973, military forces under Pinochet’s command bombed the national palace and murdered Chile’s president, Salvador Allende. The coup was bought and paid for by American taxpayers, the money funneled through the CIA. Pinochet tortured and murdered tens of thousands of Chileans, then died of old age in 2006 without ever standing trial for his crimes.

When you see Chile you wonder how this untrammeled landscape and its implacable people could ever have been shackled by a dictator; it seems like it would just shrug it off. I am lucky for the Chileans’ ability to shrug things off; I am lucky to be here.

In the end, it’s foolish to think you can unmediate, that you can pull back all the layers and see a place for what it is, in ten days spent in the company of people looking out for your comfort. I might need to know a lot of Chileans for a very long time to even begin to trace the scars that they’d rather cover, to find the hidden meaning in a pile of rotting timbers in the forest. I might need to flog a lot of waters to catch their coho. I might need to drink more than one pisco in more than one green-tea terma. I might need to learn the names of things. I might need to come back.