What Comes After What Comes Next

Taylor left Hutton for Ernst & Young but kept working with Wacker. Then Taylor agreed to run Yankelovich itself. One of his first priorities was to turn Wacker loose. "I loved the social forecasting stuff that Yankelovich did," Taylor says. "But the pure empiricists at the firm never wanted to go beyond the data -- they didn't want to interpret it. I liberated Watts to conclude whatever he wanted to. We started going on the road together, giving speeches, getting noticed. We got pretty well known in a hurry."

Taylor tired of the managerial grind associated with Yankelovich and embarked on a path that eventually landed him at Gateway. Wacker left shortly thereafter, because he felt support for his methodologies was diminishing : "I was considered too 'avante garde.'" But he found a warm reception at SRI, which set him up in an office near his suburban Connecticut home.

As a futurist, Wacker knows well the trend toward media compression -- the tendency of "sound bites" to shrink from 12 seconds to 8 seconds to 5 seconds. He has a vast store of sound bites to illustrate every aspect of his life. On private school: "I was number 59 in a class of 61." College: "For six years, I don't think there was a day that went by I didn't smoke dope. But I never missed one class." His guiding force: "My personal mantra is to live an ordinary life in an extraordinary way."

Bill Cummins wants a "freeflow." A senior vice president and director of account planning at Rubin Postaer & Associates, the ad agency based in Santa Monica, he leads Wacker into a conference room with a killer view of the Pacific Ocean and introduces him to a group of agency mangers. These folks are involved in the agency's upcoming pitch for the Acura account. Rubin Postaer already has the Honda account, and is competing against five other agencies for the Acura business -- the biggest piece of business up for grabs west of Chicago, worth at least $125 million in billings. Ketchum Advertising, the incumbent, is doing everything it can to retain the account.

"We're at the thought-spawning stage," Cummins explains to Wacker. "To pitch new business, we get in rooms with tackable walls, get butcher paper up, and go to town. We already have Yankelovich; we're working with anthropologists who send us boxes of artifacts. Today's session would be most valuable if we could think and talk extemporaneously."

Wacker nods and leans back in his chair.

Cummins says that Ketchum, which has had the account for a decade, never established a "true brand" for Acura: "Precision crafted performance? What does that mean?" Everybody laughs. He says the current campaign, which recites the "ingredients" that go into an Acura, provides too much information for busy, upscale people.

Wacker has had enough of the "freeflow" and wants to speak. He introduces the team to a trend he thinks is relevant. More and more people, he says, are becoming "aficionados" of something in which they have an intense personal interest. It's a way of focusing themselves in a period of change and chaos. Aficionados will dramatically overspend in one category -- wine, audio equipment, computer games -- and underspend in most other categories.

In less than a minute, a member of the Rubin Postaer team states the obvious -- the Acura just isn't a car that appeals to car aficionados. Wacker gently explains that the car could be pitched as a brand for aficionados in general. Ads could feature collectors of jazz records or high-priced baseball memorabilia. These folks understand real value; they buy or lease an Acura so they can afford to pursue their true passions.

Wacker's discussion of aficionados is really a spin on his broader argument about cultural schizophrenia. In an age of material abundance and uniformity, he says, scarcity becomes more and more valuable. And what's most scare is difference itself.

"Do you know what's growing in scarcity?" he asks. "Creativity, being disconnected, patience, face-to-face contact, personalities, heroes." It's what helps explain the frenzy over the Jackie O. auction -- people are eager to buy anything with limited availability. "Pretty soon Mars is going to stop making regular M&Ms," he predicts. "They'll be making Valentine M&Ms, Spring M&Ms, Summer M&Ms, Christmas M&Ms ... "

Everybody is taking notes. The executives at Rubin Postaer look at Wacker the same way the DreamWorks executives looked at Wacker. As if he has the answers.

Back in Montana, in the same hotel where he bantered with the reluctant bartender, Wacker is conversing with a dour-looking man. The "observational researcher" is back at work. He asks the fellow a few uncomplicated questions -- What do you do? Do you like your job? that unleash a torrent of stories and opinions. Within minutes, Wacker learns that this man is from Reno, on vacation with his wife and sons, and can't have sex with his wife because the hotel has booked his entire family into one room. Wacker isn't surprised by his new friend's openness -- we live in a society, he says, that's experienced radical changes in what we feel comfortable talking about.