Chris Anderson's book The Long Tail came highly recommended by some owners of record labels I work with, so after spotting it in the bookstore at JFK one day, I spent the rest of my ride home immersed. I expected it to be about the future of the music industry; what I didn't expect was that it would also contain a powerful message for the advertising and marketing industries.

In The Long Tail, Anderson defines how the new online marketplace is changing the modern consumer. Where marketing wisdom has traditionally held that 20% of inventory accounts for 80% of sales (a tenet known as the 20/80 rule), the online sphere has allowed consumers to reach much deeper into the niche marketplace. Using statistics from Netflix, Amazon, iTunes and Rhapsody, Anderson builds a case for the idea that consumers will always take more content choices where they're on offer. This increased splintering is such that the aggregate of the revenue in the tail (ie. the small amounts of revenue generated by a variety of specialized options) will soon rival that of the head (ie. hit records, blockbuster movies, etc). The Long Tail shows the cultivation of a new consumer that must be reached openly and honestly. How will advertisers respond? This book has rung a bell for many in the entertainment and media sectors, so I set out to see if Chris thought that ringing sound was a toll bell or a school bell.

How does The Long Tail apply to advertising?
You tell me if this is marketing: my engagement with Microsoft is now primarily through their bloggers. They have 3,000 engineers who blog about specific products. The topics are very narrow, but I actually have an opinion on them, and I'm delighted they are giving me insights and previews into their upcoming products. When those products come out, I'm going to be their biggest fan, saying I have confidence in them - not because Microsoft had a good advertising campaign or because Bill Gates had a press conference - but because I have been following their development for three years thanks to this engineer's blog. Microsoft used to have two guys at the top and a bunch of marketers; now it has 3,000 engineer blogs, some of which I read. Is that marketing?

Do you think there are good examples of advertisers reaching people in TLT?
The big lesson of The Long Tail is that the drivers of demand are primarily peer to peer, word of mouth, amplified by the web, and measured by links. In the book, I talk about cultural filters and the new tastemakers. Those tastemakers are individuals. There has been a complete shift in trust. We used to trust institutions, including marketing and advertising - now we trust individuals. You may think your brand is what you say it is, but it's not. To [this] generation, your brand is what Google says it is.

I don't care how many millions of dollars you spend on branding and marketing; if I google brand X and the first page of results says "brand X sucks," people will give that authentic customer ranking enough weight to undo billions of dollars in brand equity. That's the power of one blogger. Bad news tends to propagate fast, people link to it, a link turns to a page rank, a page rank turns to higher results on a search and a generation growing up online gives it weight. That is the tyranny of the crowd at the moment.

Chevrolet invited consumers to create commercials for the Tahoe. What do you think of that campaign?
I have talked to people about it and the impression I got was that it was a huge win for Chevy. It was incredibly popular, it was watched by millions of people. The fact that Chevy would let people do this, that they didn't shut it down and that it got hacked by the environmentalists made Chevy look kinda cool. From my perspective, that campaign was very subversive, effective in getting the vehicle in the public consciousness and cementing a certain rebellious quality that attracted the SUV buyer in the first place. If you really want to do this right and open it to peer production in a way that shows you culturally get it, you have to accept that all traffic is good traffic and that people are going to fuck with your stuff. In a remix culture, that's a success. You have to understand people are going to be subversive. We have had consultants tell us that campaign was a mistake, but I'm just not convinced.

Are advertisers big and small spending too much time in the head and not in the tail?
I look at TV advertising and say 'How can this still exist in 2006?' Why are they showing an ad that measurably has no appeal to 90% of the audience in the hopes that the 10% might act on it? I think advertising is fantastic, I love it, it's some of the most creative and entertaining stuff around; I just don't understand why we show [TV ads] to people who are demonstrably not interested in them. Contrast broadcast advertising with what people are actually going out of their way to watch, like the stuff on YouTube - the difference is you get to choose.

Sarah Gavigan is the founder of the Los Angeles based music house, Ten Music. Chris Anderson is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and the author of The Long Tail.