There’s a marketing person somewhere who should be proud of himself for pulling off a nice little feat at my expense yesterday. I subscribe to the email newsletters regularly pushed out by the folks at Definitive Jux Records, and because I rarely have time to properly read them, my usual pattern is to quickly scan their contents — perhaps without really retaining anything — before hitting the delete key. When I got the latest update yesterday, I noticed a big emphasis at the top of the email for the debut full-length album from The Perceptionists, this week’s hotly tipped hip-hop act. Being generally preoccupied with design and online geekery — and also being generally squarer than I was a decade ago — it was the first time I had heard of them.

Every Breath You Take

A little later in the evening, I ran out to the market, and picked up a copy of The Village Voice on the way. On the lower right hand side of its cover, a little blurb extolled me to “‘Party Hard’ with the Perceptionists”; the hip-hop collective (I hate that word) are this week’s headliners for the Voice’s Choices pull-out section. Then, while paying for some groceries at the market, I noticed a copy of the latest issue of Time Out New York sitting by the cashier, which included a blurb to this effect on its cover: “Hip-hop That Matters: The Perceptionists.”

Wow. Three quick Perceptionists hits in three different places in under an hour. That was enough to convince me to go and see if the artists had any songs available for purchase at the iTunes Music Store (just three) and to wonder how many tracks I might be able to download with Acquisition X (I was too lazy). Mostly though, it made me think that all the progress we’ve seen in technology, media and communications — which we generally write down as social advancements — really amount to more perfect methods for marketing goods. Of course there was nothing particularly high-tech about that little marketing hat trick, but merely having the ability to go online and satisfy my curiosity instantly makes the whole marketing equation a thousand times more effective. Anyway, if anyone picked up the full CD yesterday, let me know how it is. My curiosity is piqued.