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that they’re almost always accompanied by fractions with huge denominators. If you reach 100 million people, but only .000001 percent of the audience buys your product, well, you’ve just sold exactly one unit.
    Years ago, when I first predicted the demise of the banner ad as we know it, people laughed at me. At the time, banner ads were selling for a CPM of $100. (CPM is the cost per thousand ad impressions.) That means you’d pay $100 for a thousand banners.
    What advertisers who measured (the vast minority) soon realized was that every time they bought a thousand banners, they got exactly zero clicks. The banners had a hit rate of less than .000001 percent. The law of large numbers was at work.
    Today, you can buy banner ads for less than a dollar a thousand. A 99 percent drop. I did a deal with one site in which I bought 300 million banner ads for a total cost of $600. The funny thing is that I lost money on the deal. Those 300 million banner ads (that’s more than one banner impression for every single person in the United States) ended up selling less than $500 worth of merchandise.
    As consumers get better and better at ignoring mass media, mass media stops working. Sure, there are always gimmicks that work (animated online pages or product tie-ins with reality TV shows come to mind), but the vast majority of ordinary advertising is victim to this unrepealable law.
    SoundScan is a neat company with a fascinating product. Working with retailers and record companies, SoundScan knows exactly how many copies of every released album are sold, every week, in the entire country.
    What’s surprising is how horribly so many records do. In 2002, the New York Times reported that of the more than 6,000 albums distributed by the major labels, only 112 albums sold more than 500,000 copies last year. Many, many titles don’t sell even one copy some weeks. What does it take to find a stranger, reach that stranger, teach that stranger, and then get that stranger to walk into a store and buy what you’re selling? It’s too hard.
    In almost every market measured, the “leading brand” has a huge advantage over the others. Whether it’s word processors, fashion magazines, Web sites, or hairdressers, a lot of benefits go to the brands that win. Often a lesser brand has no chance at all. There may be a lot of consumers out there, but they’re busy consumers, and it’s just easier to go with the winner. (Of course, this is true only until the “winner” stops being interesting—and then, whether it’s cars, beer, or magazines, a new leader emerges.)

Case Study: Chip Conley
     
    My friend and colleague Chip Conley runs more than a dozen hotels in San Francisco. His first hotel, the Phoenix, is in one of the worst neighborhoods downtown.
    Chip got the hotel (it’s really a motel) for next to nothing. He knew that it wasn’t a hotel for everybody. In fact, no matter what he did to the Phoenix, hardly anyone would choose to stay there.
    Which is fine. Because “hardly anyone” can be quite enough if you’ve got a hotel with just a few dozen rooms. Chip redesigned the place. He painted it funky colors. Put hip style magazines in all the rooms. Had a cutting-edge artist paint the inside of the pool, and invited up-and-coming rock-and-roll stars to stay at the place.
    Within months, the plan worked. By intentionally ignoring the mass market, Chip created something remarkable: a rock-and-roll motel in the center of San Francisco. People looking for it found it.
    Make a list of competitors who are not trying to be everything to everyone. Are they outperforming you? If you could pick one underserved niche to target (and to dominate), what would it be? Why not launch a product to compete with your own—a product that does nothing but appeal to this market ?
     

The Problem with the Cow
     
    ... is actually the problem with fear.
    If being a Purple Cow is such an easy, effective way to break through the clutter, why doesn’t