“I spend a lot of time killing fish so I won’t kill myself.” Ernest Hemingway*

*It should be noted that Hemingway did eventually kill himself, after which he was no longer able to use this excuse.

From “The Creature from the Black Lagoon” by Jim Shepard, an under-read master of the short story form, from his collection Love and Hydrogen:

Once in the water I sank to my knees down a slope, the muck giving way in clouds. I was happy they’d turned me out. I was rooting against me. I was less their shadow side than an oafish variant on a theme. Extinction was pouring over me like a warm flood, history swirling and eddying one last time before moving on, and I was like the pain of a needle frond in the foot: I filled the moment entirely, and then vanished.

As Recession Watch continues, eMarketer weighs in with further evidence that the online channel may get to sit this one out, assuming the news doesn’t get any worse. (Probably a false assumption, given the news today on Wachovia). The prediction of continued growth is heartening; the predicted allocation of budget by tactic is, I think, about as reliable as investing in sub-prime securities. Who knows what tactic will prevail in the distant future, four years from now. We’ll all be piloting personal spaceships by then, won’t we?

An Irony Deficiency Award goes to Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who, having systematically destroyed coffee culture, now complains to anyone who will listen that coffee culture has been destroyed. I feel you, Howard. Fortunately I can just trot on down to authentic barista Torrefazione — oops, no, Starbucks bought them up just to shut them down. Well, at least there’s Coffee People — oops, no, another local beneficiary of Starbucks’ efforts to become the McCoffee by eliminating the competition. But Schultz’s lack of irony is still inspiring: I’m rereading Julius Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul to see if he complains about the Gauls being surly.

Watching the non-story of the current recession unfold in the press has been slow-drip torture. Can we all please just agree that we are in a recession and get on with it? If there are any remaining economic indicators that say otherwise, please raise your hand.

Economists seem to agree that the primary engine of the economy is consumer confidence, which is largely a psychological factor, is it not? Then consumer confidence can only be eroded further by another 6 months of are-we-or-aren’t-we, as opposed to buckling down and getting through it. The problem, of course, is that news cycles and economic cycles move at very different paces, and the need to fill 24 hours of financial news with economic predictions helps fuel the hysteria, albeit a low-key, slow-paced, tremendously dull hysteria.

All of which has nothing whatsoever to do with the real purpose of this post, which is to gloat about how online marketing, which was effectively blown to bits by the bursting dot-com bubble in the last recession, seems poised to weather this one just fine, thank you very much. Somewhat premature but still compelling data from a Marketing Sherpa survey shows a trend we’re fairly confident will continue to hold up: marketers are actually shifting budgets toward online as the most efficient and measurable channel during the downturn.

Watch for further updates from the cat-bird seat as the situation develops.

The Oregonian is apparently not going to print my letter regarding their ever-diminishing standards for book reviews (They didn’t publish my previous one either). They needn’t be so touchy; after all, they’re right in line with national trends. But what’s the point of having a blog if I can’t rant and rave, so here it is:

The Oregonian seems determined to make its own contribution to the national decline in book reviewing, despite its status as paper of record for a town of bibliophiles who deserve better. Marc Mohan’s review of Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke displays the part-time reviewer’s typically anxious need to play Guess the Author’s Intentions instead of taking the book on its own terms. Baker’s manifold history of the pre-WWII public conversation offers dozens of competing perspectives, all of which could enlarge any thoughtful reader’s understanding of events. But Mohan frets about the lack of an “explicit authorial voice” and clings to the single-page Afterword, in which Baker briefly accounts for his own views, as proof of the book’s failure. Mohan even goes so far as to label Baker’s narrative style “dangerous,” a reckless charge that has no place in respectable reviewing. In the marketplace of ideas, only ignorance is dangerous.

Nicholson Baker has long been one of my favorite writers. His wide-ranging work suggests that he is trivially obsessive, a serious bibliophile, and possessed of an imaginatively dirty mind — all traits I really admire. I’ m right now plowing through his new non-fiction study of the build-up to World War II, Human Smoke.

It’s a new form both for him and for history writing in general — it most closely resembles an oral history in that it consists of multiple voices heard in short vignettes, but most of the perspectives are from news sources or public speeches. The book details day-by-day the inexorable march to war over the decade preceding it, and the effect is like a bad dream of watching the horror unfold at an accelerated rate, and feeling powerless to stop it. Reading through the end of 1939 I found myself hoping, against all logic, that the cease-fire would hold and that war would be averted. It’s a strange sensation. I can’t recommend it enough.

The reviews I’ve seen have mainly stratified along the line of whether the book makes a case against the “good war,” but I think that’s reductive; the form itself works against any singular, monolithic reading. I’m convinced that anyone who takes up this book will find their perspective on the war challenged and widened. We complain often enough, and rightfully enough, that history only gives us 20/2o hindsight, but when we go back and take a look at what foresight offered us and we chose to ignore — well, that’s sobering.

iMediaConnection is running a lengthy “Viral Marketing 101” sort of piece in their In Focus section, and it stands to contribute a good deal to the degradation of the term “viral marketing,” if not to the concept itself. Could we all please agree on a worthwhile definition of this concept before it gets flogged to death?

Too late. The article cites the ubiquity of advertising catchphrases like “Yo quiero Taco Bell” and “What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” as examples of highly successful viral campaigns. Hmm, I do remember that cute chihuahua, now why is that? Could it be because Taco Bell paid Chiat/Day half a billion dollars to make sure that I would? Let’s say as a rule of thumb that if your viral campaign costs the equivalent of buying every man, woman, and child in the United States a meal in your restaurant, that ain’t viral marketing. It’s just marketing.

I’m being cranky about this and the article’s other top-down examples because I think marketers are in real danger of losing the point of viral marketing entirely. I agree with the basic premise that viral marketing involves brand messages getting passed along outside of a paid media scenario. But that’s not enough; by that logic, a Pepsi-emblazoned Frisbee (sorry, flying disk) being tossed around a park is a viral campaign.

I think the essence of successful viral marketing is that the message gets passed around because the marketer cedes control over what happens after the intial set-up. That means, inherently, that heavily promoted, tightly managed brands are going to have a tougher time succeeding in viral marketing than brands whose customers already have a sense of mutual ownership. That’s why the Quicksilver YouTube campaign cited in the article was a huge success, but similar such YouTube seeding efforts by mega-brands have been miserable failures.

The big brands can get there too. White Horse just won an IAC award for a User-Generated-Content campaign for Columbia Sportswear that let users deconstruct Columbia’s longstanding “Tested Tough” campaign with tough tests of their own. By ceding control of the brand promise to users who could (and did) come up with outrageous interpretations, the company got back more than it gave in user input, participation, and pass-along.

A doubt this word ever makes it into creative briefs authored for viral campaigns, but the key ingredient here is humility — the grassroots brand stays close to its roots, or the big brand stoops to conquer. It also helps to have great creative.

If, like me, you enjoy checking email while driving, it should come as no surprise that our compulsive multimedia-multitasking tendencies also extend to Web/TV cross-pollination, according to Harris Interactive’s latest study. Nothing particularly revealing about the first two items in this chart: you mean to say TV doesn’t fully occupy our brains? Stunning.

But the third item — the 19% related content surfing — now that’s interesting. In these cases, I think the Web is often providing a gloss or a deep-dive on TV content. You’re watching “John Adams” on HBO and can’t keep your Founders straight? It’s Wikipedia time.

As online media becomes more micro-targeted and contextual, this cross-pollination offers huge potential. Big brands spend billions trying to drive from TV ads straight to the Web, with limited success. Why? Because that would be counter-contextual: you’re not watching TV for the ads, you’re watching for the content. What if instead of buying all that TV time, marketers purchased related search terms and placed ads on relevant content sites only during key programming?

Example: there’s a show on Nat’l Geo about Greece. Your cruise line offers cruises to Greece. Instead of buying advertising during the show, you bet big on Greece-related keywords and display ads on related content sites only during and after the show. Ad-serving technology finally makes this level of dayparting possible. Think of how much efficiency you’d gain over a big offline buy. Has anyone tried this? I would love to hear how it went.

Perhaps even more devastating than the end of Governor Eliot Spitzer’s promising career is the fact that his political obituary will forever be accompanied by this photo of him making the Bitter Beer Face. It appears as though his lower lip is devouring his head.