Gordon has a kind of relentless curiosity about the world. "I've run into trendsetters who look completely Joe Regular Guy," she went on. "I can see Joe Regular Guy at a club listening to some totally hard-core band playing, and I say to myself, ohmigod, what's that guy doing here, and that totally intrigues me, and I have to walk up to him and say, hey, you're really into this band. What's up? You know what I mean? I look at everything. If I see Joe Regular Guy sitting in a coffee shop and everyone around him has blue hair, I'm going to gravitate toward him because, hey, what's Joe Regular Guy doing in a coffee shop with people with blue hair?"

With her stable of Innovator correspondents in place, Gordon would then go back to them two or three or four times a year, asking them what music they were listening to, what television shows they were watching, what clothes they were buying, or what their goals and aspirations were. The data were not always coherent. They required interpretation. Different ideas would pop up in different parts of the country, then sometimes move east to west or sometimes west to east. But by looking at the big picture, by comparing the data from Austin to Seattle and Seattle to Los Angeles and Los Angeles to New York, and watching it change from one month to the next, Gordon was able to develop a picture of the rise and movement of new trends across the country. And by comparing what her Innovators were saying and doing with what mainstream kids were saying and doing three months or six months or a year later, she was able to track what sorts of ideas were able to make the jump from the cool subcultures to the Majority.

"Take the whole men-wearing-makeup, the Kurt Cobain, androgynous thing," Gordon said. "You know how he used to paint his fingernails with Magic Marker? We saw that in the Northwest first, then trickling through Los Angeles and New York and Austin because they have a hip music scene. Then it trickled into other parts of the country. That took a long time to go mainstream."

Gordon's findings became the template for the Airwalk campaign. If she found new trends or ideas or concepts that were catching fire among Innovators around the country, the firm would plant those same concepts in the Airwalk ads they were creating. Once, for example, Gordon picked up on the fact that trendsetters were developing a sudden interest in Tibet and the Dalai Lama. The influential rap band Beastie Boys were very publicly putting money into the Free Tibet campaign, and were bringing monks on stage at their concerts to give testimonials. "The Beastie Boys pushed that through and made it okay," Gordon remembers. So Lambesis made a very funny Airwalk ad with a young Airwalk-wearing monk sitting at a desk in a classroom writing a test. He's looking down at his feet because he's written cheat notes on the side of his shoes. (When a billboard version of the ad was put up in San Francisco, Lambesis was forced to take it down, after Tibetan monks protested that monks don't touch their feet, let alone cheat on tests.) When James Bond started popping up on the trendsetter radar, Lambesis hired the director of the James Bond movies to film a series of commercials, all of which featured Airwalk-clad characters making wild escapes from faceless villains. When trendsetters started to show an ironic interest in country club culture, and began wearing old Fred Perry and Izod golf shirts, Airwalk made a shoe out of tennis ball material and Lambesis made a print ad of the shoe being thrown up in the air and hit with a tennis racket. "One time we noticed that the future technology thing was really big," Gordon says. "You'd ask some kid what they would invent, if they could invent anything they wanted, and it was always about effortless living. You know, put your head in a bubble, push a button, and it comes out perfect. So we got Airwalk to do these rounded, bubbly outsoles for the shoes. We started mixing materials — meshes and breathable materials and special types of Gore-Tex and laying them on top of each other." To took through the inventory of Airwalk ads in that critical period, in fact, is to get a complete guide to the fads and infatuations and interests of the youth culture of the era: there are 30-second spoofs of kung fu movies, a TV spot on Beat poetry, an X-files-style commercial in which a young man driving into Roswell, New Mexico, has his Airwalks confiscated by aliens.

There are two explanations for why this strategy was so successful. The first is obvious. Lambesis was picking on various, very contagious, trends while they were still in their infancy. By the time their new ad campaign and the shoes to go along with it were ready, that trend (with luck) would just be hitting the mainstream. Lambesis, in other words, was piggy-backing on social epidemics, associating Airwalk with each new trend wave that swept through youth culture. "It's all about timing," Gordon says. "You follow the trendsetters. You see what they are doing. It takes a year to produce those shoes. By the time the year goes, if your trend is the right trend, it's going to hit those mainstream people at the right time. So if you see future technology as a trend — if you see enough trendsetters in enough cities buying things that are ergonomic in design, or shoes that are jacked up, or little Palm Pilots, and when you ask them to invent something, they're all talking about flying cars of the future — that's going to lead you to believe that within six months to a year everyone and his grandmother will be into the same thing."

Lambesis wasn't just a passive observer in this process, however. It is also the case that their ads helped to tip the ideas they were discovering among Innovators. Gordon says, for example, that when something fails to make it out of the trendsetter community into the mainstream, it's usually because the idea doesn't root itself broadly enough in the culture: "There aren't enough cues. You didn't see it in music and film and art and fashion. Usually, if something's going to make it, you'll see that thread running throughout everything — through what they like on TV, what they want to invent, what they want to listen to, even the materials they want to wear. It's everywhere. But if something doesn't make it, you'll only see it in one of those areas." Lambesis was taking certain ideas, and planting them everywhere. And as they planted them, they provided that critical translation. Gordon's research showed that Innovator kids were heavily into the Dalai Lama and all of the very serious issues raised by the occupation of Tibet. So Lambesis took one very simple reference to that — a Tibetan monk — and put him in a funny, slightly cheeky situation. They tweaked it. The Innovators had a heavily ironic interest in country club culture. Lambesis lightened that. They made the shoe into a tennis ball, and that made the reference less arch and funnier. Innovators were into kung fu movies. So Lambesis made a kung fu parody ad in which the Airwalk hero fights off martial arts villains with his skateboard. Lambesis took the kung fu motif and merged it with youth culture. In the case of the Chinese scholar's vacation, according to Allport, the facts of the situation didn't make sense to the people of the town; so they came up with an interpretation that did make sense — that the scholar was a spy — and, to make that new interpretation work, "discordant details were leveled out, incidents were sharpened to fit the chosen theme, and the episode as a whole was assimilated to the preexisting structure of feeling and thought characteristic of the members of the group among whom the rumor spread." That's just what Lambesis did. They took the cultural cues from the Innovators — cues that the mainstream kids may have seen but not been able to make sense of — and leveled, sharpened, and assimilated them into a more coherent form. They gave those cues a specific meaning that they did not have previously and packaged that new sensibility in the form of a pair of shoes. It can hardly be a surprise that the Airwalk rumor spread so quickly in 1995 and 1996.