Totally awesome. And that, gentlemen, is all I said.’ He clicked again and brought up the home page of another Photoxed image of himself, this one slim, taut and toned. ‘OK? That’s all I said.’
‘To who?’ asked Ben.
‘To the eight people who decided to go there over the past three months as a result of me telling them that. One from France, two from Germany, one from Australia and four from right here in the States.’
Kevin grinned. ‘You did a Cooley.’
Chris cocked a finger at him. ‘Now you get it. A Cooley. Only not with a pair of sneakers or a wet suit, Tonya, my pretty little friend. With a twelve thousand dollar yoga retreat.’
‘What’s a Cooley?’ demanded James.
‘When you get someone to buy something,’ said Kevin, ‘preferably against their previous preferences.’
‘And it took you three months to get eight people to sign up,’ said James dismissively.
‘Spending half an hour a day, max.’
‘Eight people.’
‘There are more on the way. It takes a little time to build up a head of steam. The next three months, I’d say it will be twenty.’
‘Twenty,’ snorted James.
‘Twelve thousand each, James. What if it was cars, yachts, skiing holidays, designer clothes, designer goods? Anything high end, anything expensive? Let me ask you a question. What’s the best form of advertising? Let me answer it for you. Word of mouth. Fishbowl is the mouth, gentlemen. A mouth wired directly into the ears of hundreds of millions of people, and only Fishbowl knows exactly what they want to hear and when they want to hear it.’
Ben glanced at Andrei for a second, then turned back to Chris. ‘You’re saying we do this? We go to businesses and say we can target your potential customers with a virtual personality that persuades them to buy their product?’
‘Correct,’ said Chris. ‘Although persuades is a strong word. Think of it as raising awareness. You raise awareness at the right moment, and you don’t even need persuasion.’
‘And what? We have people sitting here doing it?’
‘Correct again. This will only work for high-end goods. My rough calculations say that anything that sells for over five to seven thousand dollars – very roughly – will be a financially viable object for this kind of marketing. Think about those eight people who are going to Bali. Do you remember where they came from? The States, France, Germany, Australia. Think about it. Three continents, four countries. How much advertising would you have had to throw out across the world to find those exact people, at the exact right time when they’re ready to consider going on some kind of retreat, with the exact right idea? But me, hey, I’m sitting there talking to them! I don’t have to go finding them – they tell me when they’re ready! And all I have to say is, I’ve heard of this great place. That’s it! And, yes, in case you’re wondering, every one of those eight, when they come back, when they’ve had that experience, become advertisers themselves. Word of mouth. Word of mouth building on word of mouth. We prime it and we keep it going. You sell this idea to an advertiser, and you do it so you get not only the commission on the sale but the commission on the expected value of the sales the word of mouth will generate. That’s a significant multiple.’
‘Have you done that?’ demanded James. ‘Has this resort in Bali been paying you?’
‘Not yet. It was an experiment. At the moment, they have no idea why they’re experiencing such a surge of interest.’
There was silence.
‘Cool,’ said Kevin.
Andrei was staring at the picture of the yoga retreat, frowning.
Chris sat down and let him think.
Since the summer in La Calle Court when Chris had begun collaborating with Kevin on personas, he had become increasingly fascinated with the thoroughness and commitment of Kevin’s approach to something that, like a butterfly, might last only a number of weeks and then disappear. Kevin constructed lives and, like a freewheeling cyber magpie, stole whatever he needed – a face there, a body here, a background, a friend, a family – to give them substance. There was performance and creativity in it as well as deep subversion, all qualities of high importance to Chris’s conception of spirituality. He had seen how a personality grew and took on a life of its own, a life that had a logic beyond the intentions with which it had been launched into the world. He had experienced how it was to