Traditionally, a company that spots a sudden market opportunity responds by gearing ads toward the new customers. But Neal Stewart, Pabst's marketing whiz, had studied ''No Logo,'' Naomi Klein's anti-corporate manifesto, and he understood that overt commercial messages would turn off an audience suspicious of capitalism. Thus the company shunned celebrity endorsements — Kid Rock had been interested — and devoted its budget instead to murketing, sponsoring a series of unlikely gatherings across the country. Like ''some kind of small-scale National Endowment for the Arts for young American outsider culture,'' Pabst paid the bills at bike messenger contests, skateboarder movie screenings, and art and indie publishing get-togethers. …

It's not just downscale beer companies that have taken to murketing. To popularize its youth-focused Scion brand, Toyota held parties for editors of indie magazines with names like Art Prostitute. Red Bull is thought to have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on ''stealth'' events, financing competitions for, among other things, kiteboarding, video gaming and break-dancing.

Murketing is a vague form of marketing — the message isn't clearly spelled out, and the ad seems to bear little relation to the product. In a typical murketing campaign, the advertiser will send out an intriguing video that will get people blogging — such as a gorilla playing the drums to Phil Collins's In the Air Tonight. Only after the video ends is it revealed to be an ad for a chocolate bar. Or they'll send out a video purporting to be something real, wait until the whole world is talking about it, then reveal that it was a hoax all along.

I, unlike the DMA and 21st Century Murketing [sic], realize that mutual consent is a requirement for economic transactions in a free society regardless of attempts to characterize those transactions as speech.