Buy Now: Creative Marketing that Gets Customers to Respond to You and Your Product

Chapter 2. The Geeks Inherit the Earth

A revolution has occurred in our lifetime, one that anyone born in the 1950s or 1960s would tell you was unthinkable to them. There was this whole section of culture that we had consistently ignored, even made fun of—the nerds. Those guys in math class, in the computer lab, in the chess club, with pocket protectors, calculators with way too many buttons, and those stupid plaid shirts. Well, while we were all acting cool, hanging out on or under the bleachers, the geeks inherited the earth.

They sure showed us. What they saw that none of the rest of us did was the potential of the phone, the television, and electronics to connect us. They saw the capability of the personal computer to connect us further, when the rest of us would have sworn that computers were the supreme tool of isolationism. We were wrong. The nerds were right. The value of personal computing, even beyond that of television, will be what our "age" will be known for, long after we are dust.

The catalyst this put in motion has folded our reality inside out. Beyond the Dick Tracy comic book characters of our childhood, with their wristwatch phones, today we enjoy a world where we can set up a global conference call, read an e-mail, text a message, and broadcast streaming live video, all while we're holding a cup of coffee in our other hand.

Today's consumer is media saturated—television, radio, phones, subway banners, e-mail pop-ups. The average consumer filters through more than ...