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Yet even as Watts was conducting his research, marketers were becoming increasingly convinced that trends were the product not of murky social forces, but of charismatic, connected social alphas. In truth, it was an old--even hoary--marketing concept, dating back to 1955, when the pioneering sociologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld wrote Personal Influence. They had argued that advertising affected society through a two-step process: Companies broadcast messages, which were then seized upon by "opinion leaders" who proselytized their peers. They weren't talking about celebrities like Oprah or even Paris Hilton, but about the rare everyday people who catalyze trends. Reach those opinion leaders, Katz and Lazarsfeld argued, and you'd quickly convert the masses.

Gladwell reanimated this concept in The Tipping Point. To help illustrate the cultural sway of his hypernetworked protagonists, he tapped the renowned 1967 "Six Degrees of Separation" study by sociologist Stanley Milgram. In that experiment, Milgram had given letters to 160 people in Nebraska, with instructions to ferry them to a particular stockbroker in Boston by passing the letters along to a colleague socially closer to the target. It famously took roughly six links to deliver each letter. But in a finding that particularly excited Gladwell, it was the same three friends of the stockbroker who provided the final link for half the letters that arrived successfully. They were the Connectors, as Gladwell dubbed them, who govern the flow of social information. If you wanted to get to that stockbroker, you couldn't approach just anyone. You had to go through those three friends. Possessed of huge Rolodexes, these folks are the gatekeepers, Gladwell wrote, "and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few."

"The whole reason why Duncan's work upsets people," Pilotta points out, "is that he demonstrates that the world is complex, that it's not that easy."

Actually, if you believe Watts, the world isn't just complex--it's practically anarchic. In 2006, he performed another experiment that chilled the blood of trendologists. Trends, it suggested, aren't merely hard to predict and engineer--they occur essentially at random.

Predictably, the music industry received the analysis--"Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market," published in Science in 2006--with a cocked eyebrow. When Watts presented his findings to executives at a major record label last spring, the younger among them were reasonably receptive. They're accustomed to the unpredictability of hit-making online, so they can grasp the terrifying randomness of success.

But the older execs?

Watts laughs. "They were all like, 'I think it's bullshit. I'm still going to go with my gut,'" he recalls. "And I'm like, Okay, good luck to you. You're going to need it."

Watts and Peretti set up a regular mass-market ad buy, running banner ads on several prominent blogs and news sites. Like many ads these days, they added a button on the ad that allows people to forward the ad to a friend--a way of collecting eyeballs for free. Typically, people ignore this "share with your friends" pitch. But Watts and Peretti included technology called ForwardTrack, which displays the route the ad travels once you've forwarded it. This turned ad forwarding into a piece of social cartography. People would pass the ad specifically to those friends most likely to keep it moving. It became a Facebook-like contest to sign up the most friends.

The technique marries Watts's two main epiphanies: Cascades require word-of-mouth effects, so you need to build a six-degrees effect into an ad campaign; but since you can never know which person is going to spark the fire, you should aim the ad at as broad a market as possible--and not waste money chasing "important" people. And it worked. The pass-around effect doubled the number of people who saw the Brady Campaign's ad. They paid for 22,582 hits and received an additional 31,590 for free. Another campaign they ran for the Oxygen network quadrupled the audience size, adding 23,544 hits to the initial 7,064.