Customer Reviews

The Chaos Scenario

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I bought this as a Kindle book while stuck at a truckstop for two days, and finished it before I got a new load assignment. I got a number of good belly laughs and quite a bit of good background about the newspaper industry and business advertising from reading this title. Anyone who has ever experienced the frustration of sitting home all day waiting for 'the cable guy' will enjoy the chapter entitled 'Comcast must Die'.

Mr. Garfield's basic premise is that today's digital age is causing a complete collapse of the venerable print-based link between advertising and news content. Advertising/marketing paid for most, if not all of the cost of news gathering and distribution. When newspapers began publishing their news for free on the internet, they broke the link and are paying the price for it now by going bankrupt enmass.

'The Chaos Scenario' continues by discussing various examples of Internet-based advertising and marketing. Garfield covers YouTube, Comcast, LEGO, Twitter, Facebook, and how these and other Internet presences interact between themselves and the public.

The final chapter is a good discussion warning us all how carefully we must guard our own online presence, because once Google spots it, nothing you write online ever disappears.

With or without a Kindle if you spend any time thinking about marketing, advertising or society Garfield's latest literary leap - "The Chaos Scenario" - is a must. It is a read far more ingenuous than its author. While Bob Garfield often seems overly caustic to agency creatives and their clients he has nailed it here. All the usual praise statements apply; - pick one [an easy read - can't put it down - share it with your friends - and - looks good on your cocktail table]. The book is not really another stern lecture that threatens us all with job loss if we don't listen. Rather, it is the work of a keen observer of contemporary culture and its relationship with media technology and what needs to happen to find meaning among the fractals of Chaos and to build the future. Garfield's simple admonition about the importance of the audience and how not only are they important and in control now but have always been so. Listenomics - his term, not mine - serves as a direction for market plans, creative briefs, use of the web - and for the teaching of this advertising craft as well. The cases used in The Chaos Scenario are beautifully articulated and in several, Garfield - in the journalist tradition - has been there and brings the reader an intimate familiarity with the circumstances. Glad he wrote it - glad I've got it.

Neal M. Burns, Ph.D.,
Professor
Director, Center For Brand Research
Department of Advertising
University of Texas at Austin
The Chaos Scenario

I first heard about the book on NPR while driving, and I had to slow down to hear the whole program, then I ordered the book immediately. I'm a middle school teacher with a fairly strong technology background; part of what I do with my students throughout the year is try to teach them to prepare for the future and filter the overload of information cascading at them every day. Garfield's book is one of those that points out the obvious that we see every day and somehow we don't see. For the first time in history, we aren't evolving into the next communication stage--an era is ending and a new one beginning.

You will find some overlooked typos (ouch for an English teacher) which I was able to forgive because I knew that such a timely book had to be rushed to the presses with revisions occurring the whole time (which was confirmed when I got to the end of the book). I trust they'll be corrected in future editions and immediately in Kindle.

This is one of those rare books (like Kelly Gallagher's Readicide) that I didn't just read, but experienced, constantly going to the Internet to check out his references and grabbing other people to share it. One site that I immediately shared at a conference that sent the teachers into a feeding frenzy was [...]

I'm also a researcher, and I've been amazed and grateful for all the resources that are now available online or at a reasonable rate; I constantly use my subscription to [...] and [...] not just for genealogy, but for access to all the primary documents housed there. I've wondered about the future of such resources and the implications of copyright.

As I read the book, I also pondered the shifting future of the publishing business, upon which Garfield only touched. The traditional model is for the struggling writer to find an agent or have extraordinarily good luck being pulled from the slush pile (all the unsolicited manuscripts publishers receive, amazingly the way Stephen King was discovered, lo, these many years ago at Doubleday). I've seen a shift in self-published novels, which used to be purely "vanity press," being picked up by major publishing houses. With Julia and Julie, I saw a blog become a book and major movie. After reading Garfield's book and seeing the success of Amazon's Kindle (and, of course, other competitors entering the digital reading field) I began to wonder: one day, will the writer be able to upload his book file directly to a site such as Amazon with a description of the title, a $9.99 Kindle price tag, with 80% going to the author and 20% to Amazon? It would cut out the need for a literary agent or a publishing house. As Garfield describes it, the masses decide what they want--why not in book publishing? If the digital book sales prove popularity, the hard copy becomes available. It's an exciting possibility, but also raises quality control questions--book editors earn their money for a reason.

His last chapter, "Nobody is Safe From Everybody," is one that I will be discussing in some form with my middle schoolers at length. A few years ago I worked shortly at a school for "high-performing" students. It was the first time in my twenty years of teaching that two students who didn't like turning in homework used their MySpace site to make death threats against me and my daughter. They then made death threats and sent hate mail to the student who reported them. To my astonishment, I and the student had no legal recourse. The state attorney general told me that Internet law has not caught up yet. Anyone could get a MySpace site and create it in someone else's name, so they couldn't bring criminal charges. All they could do was give the students ten days of out of school suspension. You can imagine my warm, toasty feelings when they returned to the classroom, and I had to teach them. This was before the Megan Meier's case, so perhaps it has changed.

Bottom line: Garfield said he hopes everyone on the planet reads the book. So do I. We'll be having some grand discussions which we absolutely need to stay afloat in the digital age.

Bob Garfield is funny, has a breezy writing style, is a good storyteller, and is often self-deprecating and irreverent. I follow his work as co-host of NPR's On the Media and as a columnist at Advertising Age. This book is utterly reflective of Garfield's work.

Compiled over four years, the book reads like a collection of Garfield's engaging radio and print stories. No doubt the result of the book's genesis: to brand an evolving series of articles chronicling the ongoing disruption in the media industry.

NPR listeners will instantly recognize a familiar story formula for the book's chapters and segments. It makes it all inviting, friendly, and in the end, a fun read.

But, in total, it feels disjointed, and feature-story unsatisfying.

The Chaos Scenario is worth the read for its collection of media and brand stories or as an introduction to Web 2.0 culture. For anyone familiar with today's social media, there won't be anything new.

The crowdsourced-designed book cover tells us Garfield "connected the dots" on the disruption of the New Media Order long ago. We are promised the answer to institutional survival in our digitally connected world. A bit overstated.

Garfield delivers on the first point, giving us a smart primer on the evolution of the media landscape of recent years. He does it through loads of stories, many of them are now classic "power of the consumer voice" case studies. Garfield's research into them is evident so they don't feel like reformulated media coverage.

Garfield first guides us through a timeline of seminal events between 2005 and mid-2009 that nicely illustrate the evolving disruption in media.

But from there onward, I found myself having to work at connecting Garfield's dots.

His various chapters zoom in on the revenue models of post-advertising media, the dawn of the widget, the rise of crowdsourcing and influencers, and the flaws of consumer generated ads. You will find a discussion of Garfield's top ten word-of-mouth principles. One whole chapter is dedicated to the digital fall and rise of Comcast.

All interestingly told and engaging (in spite of the belabored Comcast material) but Garfield gets lower marks for pulling it all together, delivering any fresh insight or providing direction.

Unfortunately Garfield's solution - dubbed Listenomics - is dated for today's media, marketing and digital zeitgeist. It feels simplistic and shapeless.

Organizations are struggling with massive challenges brought on by digital disruption such as serious gaps in skills, culture, process, distribution, business and revenue models, compensation, policy and a host of others.

In the face of these, Garfield's simple command to "listen or perish" feels like a very weak prescription.

To read the final chapter, we are invited to connect to [...] to watch it unfold in blog form, although I'm not convinced that is happening, now six months out from publication. The web site seems pretty much a standard book marketing site in blog form.

The book tie-in campaign, 30 Days of Chaos is daily emails of chapter synopses and includes pointers to some rather good articles and blog posts from around the `Net. But the discussion questions are forgettable. Admittedly, I only got through Day 7 as I write this.

The problem here is Garfield and his publisher overstep their areas of expertise by trying to be facilitators of organizational dialogue. Unfortunately the result is they invite shapeless discussion. I found myself wishing they would have collaborated with an experienced trainer, facilitator, social media consultant or organizational development specialist.

Garfield's day job is to observe and report - and at that he does an admirable job in The Chaos Scenario. Had he stuck to reporting on media disruption and not promised a prescription, his book would be much more satisfying for its readers.

Who should read this book?

* Anyone who is curious about or just getting up to speed on the modern media landscape.
* Highly recommend for media educators for use at secondary or post-secondary levels as a modern media primer.
* Media specialists looking to bolster presentation material, or a client leave-behind.

Bob Garfield, host of NPR's "On the Media" and longtime ad critic for Advertising Age, is the smartest, wittiest commentator on media and advertising in this country. His new book, "The Chaos Scenario," has as its epigraph a quote from Gen. Eric Shinseki: "If you don't like change, you're going to like irrelevancy even less." That pretty much sums up the thesis of Garfield's book: the Internet has made traditional print and broadcast media increasingly irrelevant, and they are paying the price bigtime for not anticipating the changes. Of course, as Garfield points out, even cutting-edge outfits such as YouTube are hanging on by their fingernails because they haven't figured out how to earn more than a pittance from their posted videos that millions of people watch every day. With surgical precision, Garfield outlines the perils and opportunities of the Wired Age, profiling companies (Lego, Netflix) that have turned the new technologies to their advantage, as well as the many, many companies that have been undone by their own computers.

Garfield also includes some helpful chapters on the joys and pitfalls of the Internet for individual users, as well as a hilarious chapter titled "Comcast Must Die," detailing his web-based crusade against the smug corporate giant. "The Chaos Scenario" is a funny, scary, bracing read for anyone interested in the Internet, and what can do for (and to) people.

For those of you who figured out the advertising & public relations industries are experiencing a somewhat chaotic transformation due to the rise of social networking (Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc); congratulations, you're almost as smart as Bob Garfield. Of course, he wrote this book, while we're sitting on our PCs posting inane 140 character tweets on Twitter (or sitting here on Amazon writing another stellar review). Lol.

Indeed, businesses are going to have to change their strategies, from an advertising or public relations perspective. I was joking about Twitter, but it's actually a viable alternative for some businesses, to actively "engage" their customers (requires listening to what they have to say) in order to find out what makes them tick. This in turn enables the company to manufacture the perfect widget for each individual customer.

Garfield is a cleverly engaging and entertaining guy himself, and this book was fun to peruse. He coined a new phrase ("listen-omics") which captures the essence of this new chaotic scenario; and it seems to be a good description. Essentially, with this brave new world of advertising upon us, the key to success will be thriving in chaos; you can't run; you can't hide. So you'd better get your game plan together and get ready for action.

Garfield has provided the perfect playbook, for our convenience. Good luck.

It's great to read a book and uncontrollably laugh aloud or emote and that's exactly what happened riding the green line along Comm Ave. in Boston when I read about "boom goes the dynamite" and pulled out the BlackBerry curve for the "polychronic" Chaos media experience(credit to MEdia Generations Black Shultz and BIG Research). Garfield nails it.

Days later waiting in a barber shop in Brighton, MA the barber and the customer ahead of me are talking about the music playing as the barber explains that he can't stand the repetition of Sports Center all day and his punk rock tastes scare the old guys so he used Pandora as the audio entertainment du jour with Wilco as the core artist. As he's clipping away the barber explains the technology and the barber shop conversation rolls into the demise of local radio and nobody reads the Globe any more. I was sitting there consuming chapter 7 GUESS and had to contain my laughter. Much of my career has been spent in radio sales and one of my last clients is The Boston Globe. I see this change and opportunity right here right now.

Garfield's timely work captures the seismic shift in commerce, the customer experience, media content, technology developments, marketing and the power shift from the reporter / cable system /radio staion / editor to the customer / reader / user / guy in the barber chair.

And yes, I'm looking for a new gig shifting from legacy media to new media. I'm open to suggestions and referrals.
[...].

The Chaos Scenario has many attributes to recommend it. It's prescient, quite funny and perhaps most intriguing, it makes sense of things that an observant person is probably aware of but just hasn't had the time or distance to connect the dots to understand what it all means.

Bob Garfield does that in spades. As true thought leaders do, he creates meaning for others and shows us why the death of the advertising industry will have consequences for everyone, even if you are one of the people who hates ads. Love 'em or not, advertisements are the vehicle through which someone other than the consumer has traditionally paid for programming in the mass media. Those great episodes of I Love Lucy or Start Trek that you loved were brought to you by advertisers, who paid the media companies to produce entertainment to serve as a wrap-around for their commercials. The bargain was that producers (of cereal or soap or toilet paper) would amuse us if we, in return, tolerated their sales pitches. And it worked for a long time. Until digital technology killed television as we knew it.

For awhile we just time-shifted our TV viewing and then fast forwarded through the commercials. That was disruptive enough (for the advertisers at least), but now, with the extension of Internet services and the advent of "social media" -- the Web platforms that allow the average person to publish and produce programming (now called "content") -- everyone is a content provider and consumers not only skip the commercials, they are increasingly skipping television altogether!

So now the big question becomes, how does great content get paid for? And just as important, how do we find and nurture the creation of great content, as opposed to all of the schlock that inundates the internet? Read this book and you will have the basic knowledge to become part of the conversation. Highly recommended.

PS: Garfield's account of his fight with the Comcast cable company and his subsequent creation of a site for consumer complaints about the company is hilarious and not to be missed.

Bob Garfield is a funny guy. He's also very smart. Which makes 'The Chaos Scenario' a great read.

It's hard to believe that the end of advertising and media as we know it can be such a page-turning joy. But, it is.

I was laughing so hard when he went after Comcast - using the internet and a rabid fan base of Comcast haters (of which it appears there is no shortage). At the same time, he was demonstrating that the world as we knew it is being turned upside down. The customer has enormous power because of the internet.

The larger issue in 'The Chaos Scenario' is Garfield's suggestion that ad supported 'content' (on TV, online, everywhere) is about to come unglued. And, that we are totally unprepared for it. He makes a compelling case.

If you are in advertising or any business supported by it (TV, radio, newspapers, even the internet), this book is a must read. It's time to prepare for your next business opportunity. Just because you might not want to believe the book's thesis - that the change will be bigger and more disruptive than you ever imagined - doesn't mean it isn't happening.

I agree with comments already posted about this book being both entertaining and incisive. The writing is much more witty and engaging than the typical non-fiction book, and the book pulls together a lot of ideas, data, and stories about the media transition underway.

The book clearly identifies some of the problems facing traditional media. For example (from page 25): `The unspoken compact between media and consumers - having to endure commercial messages as the quid pro quo for free or cheap content - has never applied to Generation Y and will be difficult to impose ex post facto. Never mind that the generation's intellectual-property ethos - "All Content Wants to be Free" - is stupid and criminal on the face of it. They truly believe that malarkey, and aren't apt to change their minds.' The book also makes useful suggestions about how companies can take advantage of social media to listen to and interact with customers.

My only quibble with what's in the book is that it contrasts some of the new ways of listening with some of the old in a way that focuses almost exclusively on the benefits of the former and the drawbacks of the latter. Consequently, the specific points being made are valid, but not balanced. For example, focus groups are criticized as being ungeneralizeable (which is true), yet the same is true of some of the forms of listening using new media advocated in the book. For instance, the book includes a funny description of a Web site for Modern Moist Towelette Collecting, but I suspect it would be unwise for companies that make such products to `listen' only to those commenting on that site and assume their views generalize to the non towelette-obsessed. That's not to say that monitoring buzz or the blogosphere, crowdsourcing, or whatever are not useful - just that they too have limitations.

In my opinion, the scenario businesses face is actually even more chaotic than what's described in the book. That's because the focus of the book is really on how companies get people to pay attention (in a good way) to their products. Of course, for marketing purposes, that's always been a means to the end of getting people to buy products. That requires good coordination between promotional efforts and distribution channels, and the shift from old to new media makes that harder. My experience getting this book is an example. I heard about it on an NPR podcast and tried to get it. Amazon showed the paperback as out of stock with no delivery date indicated. The Kindle version was available, but I live in New Zealand, which means that Amazon won't sell me a Kindle or even Kindle books for my iPhone. I happened to be in the US, so I checked Borders, which had never heard of the book. I also checked other iPhone book applications, but still had no luck. In the course of fruitlessly searching the Internet for someone who might want my money, I stumbled upon an e-mail address for the author. To his credit - and giving a great example of practicing what you preach - he not only responded, but he did so quickly, politely, and helpfully. One suggestion - the direct link from the publisher - didn't work because they couldn't cope with non US addresses, but he was able to tell me that the book would be available through Amazon soon.

The point I'm trying to make in sharing this experience is that in the old days media markets and distribution channels tended to be nicely aligned. (So if you were selling a book you would know where and when to make it available, and if you heard a book being promoted in the media, chances are your local bookstore would have it.) But Web 2.0, and even Web 1.0, are, by definition, world wide. It's not like your social networks, the blogs you read, or the e-commerce sites you look at are constrained to your geographic location which means that the people who want a given product may not be conveniently clustered together in close geographical proximity. Marketers having less control over the timing of communication about their products in the age of social media also makes management of distribution channels harder since it's more difficult to predict peaks in demand. The fact that there is still so far to go in aligning promotion and distribution channels even for digital products leads me to believe that the challenges associated with realigning distribution channels with new forms of promotion will create at least as much chaos as making the switch from the use of old to new media for promotion.