Glow by Ned Beauman

he seems simultaneously very nervous and very cocky. ‘We’re the first company to do serious research into disruptors, and it showed that someone like Ellie may negate, on average, about three thousand dollars in marketing spend. And that’s just offline. God forbid the bitch has a blog too! Of course, Suspiria wish they could just make Ellie disappear off the face of the earth. They can’t. But maybe they can spend two thousand dollars marketing directly to Ellie until she changes her mind – net gain of one thousand, right? Or, even better, maybe they can find two of Ellie’s friends – let’s call them Frannie and Georgie – and Suspiria only have to spend five hundred dollars each to change their minds, and if Frannie and Georgie both change their minds, then Ellie has an eighty-five per cent chance of changing her mind too – net gain of seventeen hundred, on average. But before they can do any of that, they have to identify Ellie, and they also have to identify Frannie and Georgie, and they have to understand the relationships between them, and obviously all this has to be automated because they can’t pay individual attention to every disruptor. That’s where ImPressure• comes in. There are a lot of companies out there marketing on social networks. But they take the network structure as a given. That’s a mistake. You can’t neutralise disruptors just by browsing Facebook. We map the networks ourselves, both online and offline, using super-precise, input-agnostic flow mathematics, and then we figure out how to hit the weak points. It’s like pressure-point fighting – that’s where we got the name. For Suspiria, as a pilot project, we even installed cameras in five nightclubs in LA and used ImPressure•’s facial-recognition module to cross-reference the drinkers with party photos they’d already posted online. In one night we got more metadata on local vectors of influence than any conventional market research company could hope to put together in a year.
    ‘Now, when we started ImPressure• two years ago, we thought we’d mostly be selling booze, and we were fine with that. But then we realised that what marketers call “mind share” is not that different than what you guys might call “hearts and minds”. Abdullah al-Janabi is basically a disruptor like Ellie. For the first time in history, most of the world’s population lives in cities, plus all the bad guys have seen pictures of the Gulf War: they know about smart bombs; they know they can’t win in the open. So cities are where conflict happens now, and embodied social networks are a lot more dense and complex in cities than they are in jungles or deserts. What I’m saying is, psychological operations units have to do the same job as a lot of marketing departments. Except that PSYOPS has barely moved on since the Second World War. Our investors told us that the Pentagon wouldn’t be interested in our technology. But the private sector has always been a lot more open to new ideas.
    ‘I’m going to give you a case study. Obviously I can’t name any names, so I’ll just tell you that our first PMC client was handling operational security for a European company in a resource-rich region, and they were worried about volatility in the town nearby. We took their data, built an influence map of the town, and we were able to report that nearly seventy per cent of potential disruptors listened to one local FM radio station. So the client quietly purchased that radio station and gradually began to shift its coverage. At the same time, we were able to report that there were also five potential disruptors who were especially dangerous and were not going to be receptive to targeted marketing – including one old blind guy who never left his shack but had huge suction. So the client took steps to make sure those five potential disruptors couldn’t do any more damage to mind share. ImPressure• facilitated all this from our offices in San