So you want to be a media pundit? I’ll confess my dirty little secret: I get a lot of the material for this blog from spying on the cool hunters. There are a variety of lists and Websites out there designed for marketers. These are created by so-called trend spotters, so I rely on them to tell me what is interesting to marketers. Maybe you can call it “unmarketing.” I dunno. Anyhow, I was spurned to give away my trade secret because one of the newsletters I subscribe to, The Cool Hunter, had this graphic demonstrating their campaign to place little marketing stickers on things that are deemed “cool” (click on the above image for more detail). Truth is they are just using this as a gimmick to flatter people in order to drive them to their site (after all, we all want to be cool, don’t we?). The great mystical problem of cool for marketers is that cool cannot be captured in a bottle. They know this, of course, but pretend to feign hipness anyway. But the ultimate law of cool is this: those who know don’t tell, and those who tell don’t know. Try marketing that one, my friends. And save yourself some existential grief: cool is a rat race that you will never win, so give up now before you your soul gets ground up by the newness machine.
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