At its heart, gonzo is animated by an attitude of deeply principled anti-professionalism in the best sense. And there is a best sense. [1]

Hunter S. Thompson is to the Fast Company readership what Marshall McLuhan was to Louis Rosetto-era Wired: a masthead icon who captured the readership's gaze and counter-pointed its editorial policy. Christopher Locke plays fastball with Thompson's history, conveying his 'New Journalism' cachet, his verite coverage of the Kentucky Derby, his psychological war with President Richard Nixon, and his recent ESPN columns.

For Locke, the Gonzo spirit that Thompson personified was ". . . Being a full participant in events, having a point of view, a deeply personal perspective: Gonzo is about being engaged. It's not distanced, impartial or "objective"--it cares about outcomes." [2] How exactly this call-to-action can be translated into 'best agency' practice remains elusive. The darker aspects of Thompson's career (or of colleagues like Tim Crouse, William Greider and P.J. O'Rourke) are glossed over. Obvious parallels with Method acting and Vietnam-era war reportage are neglected.

The first quarter of Locke's book retells the marketing blitz behind The Cluetrain Manifesto (2001) and his Webzine projects. Locke's rise-fall-rise story also charts many Free Agent Nation memes: the paradigm-shifting Internet (despite Thomas Kuhn's observation that paradigms are multiple ripple-effects than single transition-shifts); the decisive role of collaborative filtering; and bottom-up audience-driven micro-marketing. Locke's book reads best when he plays to his target audience, writing about 'anti-marketing-as-usual' [3] and 'professionals-turned-dilettantes'. [4]

While many Tom Peters-style business executives will savour this analysis, I was looking for some gritty campaign stories. Yes, stories: if the storytellers now reign supreme in the remaining tech magazines, Web salons and blogs (proof that Locke keeps one eye on new trends), then where are the hard-hitting case-studies?

What passes for Locke's overt skepticism about corporate business practices are often just a series of new cliches and contradictions: "Gonzo marketing isn't really about marketing at all," [5] Locke argues, instead it's "market advocacy." [6] By nominalizing the market as a surrogate God and reifying the nonlinear 'swarm' effect, Locke leaves out how financial flows and markets can be manipulated. And it's looking for what's left out that can be crucial.

The second and third quarters of Gonzo Marketing attempt to explore how the Internet has changed marketing: a zealous wake-up call for over-worked executives and temp workers. This is where the cultural 'surface' reading of Thompson-as-auteur becomes apparent: much of Gonzo journalism relies on internal frames-of-reference and the subjective approach to transactional psychology, which can be difficult to translate into pep-talk rallies. While Locke mentions social and cause-related marketing, this section reads as an introductory overview, more a self-justification than the counter-intuitive attack PR that would be expected if the 'gonzo' warrior spirit (Anasazi or perhaps Navajo?) were truly harnessed to its fullest potential.

The final section focuses on justifying the subjectivity of corporate PR contra 'objective' journalism. Locke name-drops Ben Badikian and Herbert Gans. But it's a spurious argument, especially if you invoke Hunter S. Thompson's tactics: while he skirted the thin-line between fearful parody and political loathing, Thompson's journalism worked because he was a keen observer of human behavior, and because he happened to be in the right place at the right time. Potential practitioners of Locke's Gonzo Marketing should remember that Thompson spent several years honing his style by retyping Time Magazine articles.

Which makes Locke's advice to re-examine Clifford Geertz's anthropological research and Ted Leavitt's Marketing Myopia so poignant: marketeers may recall their history, but fail to remember the Siren-like call of their potential futures. Christopher Locke sets-up journalistic objectivity as a 'straw-man' to demolish: in reality, the journalist's internal filters, industry ethics code and the environment they find themselves in will influence their stories. Will focus group marketeers be as self-honest, when they use 'gonzo' pre-scripted theatrics to elicit some self-revelations from their micro-market audiences? Journalists have publications like American Journalism Review and the industry water-cooler Jim Romenesko's Media News to gather around. Guerilla culture-jammers have groups like Adbusters, Droplift and ®™ark. Where's the equivalent self-monitoring group for Gonzo marketeers? John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton's PRWatch? Stephen Mayne's Crikey?

My problem with Locke's book is not just that I'm jealous he wrote it before I did, but because, in nit-picking True Believer style, I don't believe he goes far enough or considers the long-term implications of what he proposes. Gonzo Marketing hints at the transition currently under-way in marketing--a transition sparked by the Internet, and also by the glaring limits of current demographic/psychographic modelling tools--yet a transition that also requires a psychological shift by the marketeer beyond 1to1 models or living off the growth of alt.subcultures. Re-read Locke's meta-fictional fist-fight with Thompson and then contemplate starting a chinchilla ranch in Tasmania while you wait for your latest Business 2.0 subscription renewal notice to arrive . . .

Endnotes:

[1] Christopher Locke. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices. New York: Perseus Books, 2001. 4.

[2] Christopher Locke. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices. New York: Perseus Books, 2001. 10.

[3] Christopher Locke. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices. New York: Perseus Books, 2001. 114.

[4] Christopher Locke. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices. New York: Perseus Books, 2001. 124.

[5] Christopher Locke. Gonzo Marketing: Winning Through Worst Practices. New York: Perseus Books, 2001. 103.