There is a wonderful example of this strategy in action in Baltimore, the city whose problems with drugs and disease I talked about earlier in the book. In Baltimore, as in many communities with a lot of drug addicts, the city sends out a van stocked with thousands of clean syringes to certain street corners in its inner-city neighborhoods at certain times in the week. The idea is that for every dirty, used needle that addicts hand over, they can get a free clean needle in return. In principle, needle exchange sounds like a good way to fight AIDS, since the reuse of old HIV-infected needles is responsible for so much of the virus's spread. But, at least on first examination, it seems to have some obvious limitations. Addicts, for one, aren't the most organized and reliable of people. So what guarantee is there that they are going to be able to regularly meet up with the needle van? Second, most heroin addicts go through about one needle a day, shooting up at least five or six times — if not more — until the tip of the syringe becomes so blunt that it is useless. That's a lot of needles. How can a van, coming by once a week, serve the needs of addicts who are shooting up around the clock? What if the van comes by on Tuesday, and by Saturday night an addict has run out?

To analyze how well the needle program was working, researchers at Johns Hopkins University began, in the mid-1990s, to ride along with the vans in order to talk to the people handing in needles. What they found surprised them. They had assumed that addicts brought in their own dirty needles for exchange, that is drug users got new needles the way that you or I buy milk: going to the store when it is open and picking up enough for the week. But what they found was that a handful of addicts were coming by each week with knapsacks bulging with 300 or 400 dirty needles at a time, which is obviously far more than they were using themselves. These men were then going back to the street and selling the clean needles for one dollar each. The van, in other words, was a kind of syringe wholesaler. The real retailers were these handfuls of men — these super-exchangers — who were prowling around the streets and shooting galleries, picking up dirty needles, and then making a modest living on the clean needles they received in exchange. At first, some of the program's coordinators had second thoughts. Did they really want taxpayer-funded needles financing the habits of addicts? But then they realized that they had stumbled inadvertently into a solution to the limitations of needle exchange programs. "It's a much, much better system," says Tom Valente, who teaches in the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. "A lot of people shoot on Friday and Saturday night, and they don't necessarily think in a rational way that they need to have clean tools before they go out. The needle exchange program isn't going to be available at that time — and certainly not in the shooting galleries. But these [super-exchangers] can be there at times when people are doing drugs and when they need clean syringes. They provide twenty-four seven service, and it doesn't cost us anything."

One of the researchers who rode with the needle vans was an epidemiologist by the name of Tom Junge. He would flag down the super-exchangers and interview them. His conclusion is that they represent a very distinct and special group. "They are all very well connected people," Junge says. "They know Baltimore inside and out. They know where to go to get any kind of drug and any kind of needle. They have street savvy. I would say that they are unusually socially connected. They have a lot of contacts I would have to say the underlying motive is financial or economic. But there is definitely an interest in helping people out."

Does this sound familiar? The super-exchangers are the Connectors of Baltimore's drug world. What people at Johns Hopkins would like to do is use the super-exchangers to start a counter-drug epidemic. What if they took those same savvy, socially connected, altruistic people and gave them condoms to hand out, or educated them in the kinds of health information that drug addicts desperately need to know? Those super-exchangers sound as though they have the skills to bridge the chasm between the medical community and the majority of drug users, who are hopelessly isolated from the information and institutions that could save their lives. They sound as if they have the ability to translate the language and ideas of health promotion into a form that other addicts could understand.

Lambesis's intention was to perform this very same service for Airwalk. Obviously, they couldn't directly identify the equivalent of Mavens and Connectors and Salesmen to spread the word about Airwalk. They were a tiny ad agency trying to put together an international campaign. What they could do, though, was start an epidemic in which their own ad campaign played the role of translator, serving as an intermediary between the Innovators and everyone else. If they did their homework right, they realized, they could be the ones to level and sharpen and assimilate the cutting-edge ideas of youth culture and make them acceptable for the Majority. They could play the role of Connector, Maven, and Salesman.

The first thing Lambesis did was to develop an in-house market research program, aimed at the youth market that Airwalk wanted to conquer. If they were going to translate Innovator ideas for the mainstream, they first had to find out what those Innovator ideas were. To run their research division, Lambesis hired DeeDee Gordon, who had previously worked for the Converse athletic shoe company. Gordon is a striking woman, with a languid wit, who lives in a right-angled, shag-rugged, white-stuccoed modernist masterpiece in the Hollywood Hills, midway between Madonna's old house and Aldous Huxley's old house. Her tastes are almost impossibly eclectic: depending on the day of the week, she might be obsessed with an obscure hip-hop band, or an old Peter Sellers movie, or a new Japanese electronic gadget, or a certain shade of white that she has suddenly, mysteriously, decided is very cool. While she was at Converse Gordon noticed white teenage girls in Los Angeles dressing up like Mexican gangsters with the look they called "the wife beater" — a tight white tank top with the bra straps showing — and long shorts and tube socks and shower sandals. "I told them, this is going to hit," Gordon remembers. "There are just too many people wearing it. We have to make a shower sandal." So they cut the back off a Converse sneaker, put a sandal outsole on it, and Converse sold half a million pairs — Gordon has a sixth sense of what neighborhoods or bars or clubs to go to in London or Tokyo or Berlin to find out what the latest looks and fashion are. She sometimes comes to New York and sits watching the sidewalks of Soho and the Last Village for hours, photographing anything unusual. Gordon is a Maven — a Maven for the elusive, indefinable quality known as cool.

At Lambesis, Gordon developed a network of young, savvy correspondents in New York and Los Angeles and Chicago and Dallas and Seattle and around the world in places like Tokyo and London. These were the kind of people who would have been wearing Hush Puppies in the East Village in the early 1990s. They all fit a particular personality type: they were Innovators.

"These are kids who are outcasts in some way," Gordon says. "It doesn't matter whether it's actually true. They feel that way. They always felt like they were different. If you ask kids what worries them, the trendsetter kids pick up on things like germ warfare, or terrorism. They pick up on bigger-picture things, whereas the mainstream kids think about being overweight, or their grandparents dying, or how well they are doing in school. You see more activists in trendsetters. People with more passion. I'm looking for somebody who is an individual, who has definitely set herself apart from everybody else, who doesn't look like their peers."