By 'word of mouth'

BY EVAN  WILLIAMS ewilliams@florida-weekly.com

Courtney Jones, founder of Findwhat.com - an early online search engine - spent last year creating a new kind of search engine that allows people to trade their opinions about products they purchase. It is an undeniably hip combo, akin to a grass-root Consumer Reports, You-Tube for consumers and advertisers, and a MySpace page, all in one.

LoyalTV plans to harness the ability of anyone on the planet to share the minutiae of their lives on a website devoted to the products these people love or hate: the iPod nano, underwear deals at JC Penny, the freshest fruit stand, the best deals on a New York loft, the bar that pours the strongest drinks, or maybe a preferred treatment for cancer.

One man tells how to save money at Fry's Food and Drug Store in Phoenix, Ariz. An FGCU student explains why she loves her Blackberry cell phone. Someone named Mary tells about her likes and dislikes regarding Burt's Bees hand lotion. From back waxing to Ben-gay, Coppertone sport suntan lotion to Bare Minerals makeup, Victoria's Secret to tighty whiteys, LoyalTV has it covered coast to coast.

"My hunch was that personal broadcasting is the future of advertising," Jones said. "In the future, we'll live our lives, schedule our lives, and socialize all electronically. In the future you'll find out about [products] from people, not from the corporations that sell them. It's like a human search engine."

LoyalTV is old fashioned in its nod to word of mouth advertising, he said, moving about an office above Blu Sushi on McGregor Boulevard. "In advertising, it's called loyalty - a customer recommends a business to their friend. We're tapping the potential of a human experience, of human storytelling, if you will. Real, authentic opinions for real people."

Jones owns Blu Sushi with partners Chris Whitaker, CEO of a multi-million dollar hurricane shutter manufacturing company, and Peter Shmid, the former operator of the downtown restaurant Peter's La Cuisine.

"When I moved here from L.A., there wasn't a place to go hang out and have sushi, so we created a groovy, americanized version of sushi called Blu," Jones explained, as two young, intense documentary filmmakers took video of him being interviewed.

Jones' office is filled with large, white sheets of paper pinned to the walls, on which he had diagrammed various ideas that will be used on LoyalTV. For example, the results of a search on LoyalTV will be based on other people who have posted photos, videos or text on the site, with interests similar to individual users. If you type in the word "coffee," you might find a video of someone who had an epiphany at a Starbucks, or someone who found a cookbook with a great recipe for coffee créme brullee.

"It's the blank box of search engines, now with real people attached," he said, with theatrical flair. "Think about this notion in 360 degrees. In its purest form, LoyalTV is word of mouth television. There's this collective intelligence that we all have, and what we do is throw all that in a bucket. Now, anybody can be their own Oprah."

The site will self-police, he said, because of "the wisdom of crowds."

"No fake blogging," Jones said. "But real opinions - good, bad or indifferent."

On Jones' desk is a book by Harold Bloom called "Genius: A mosaic of 100 exemplary creative minds," along with a Patti Smith vinyl of "People Have the Power." A black Takamine acoustic guitar stood in the corner. Jones, also a musician who collects Johnny Cash memorabilia - "a hodgepodge of weird (stuff)," he said, He possesses, among other things, the 1976 American flag that President Gerald Ford gave to Cash.

Jones grew up in St. Louis, Mo. and moved to Florida in 1983, where he worked for the Beasley Broadcasting Group. He moved to Los Angeles in 1992, where he ran V-lite Video and started FindWhat.com in 1997. He moved to Florida in 2001, but he still keeps a second home in Malibu.

Jones grabbed his own Blackberry cell phone off the desk and demonstrated how a LoyalTV video ad spot might be made, while the documentarians filmed on. Once the video is made, it is posted on his personal LoyalTV page and anyone who logs onto LoyalTV and does a search for cell phones might run across his "story" about the Blackberry phone he owns.

"The technology is going to drill down on all the words associated with that piece of media," he said. "I would take the video for Blackberry, attach words to it, and put it in a new environment."

If you decide you like the Blackberry phone, a link on the site allows you to click on the words BUY IT NOW. Another element of the sight is "Brandworld," which is a compilation of all the good reviews a product received. LoyalTV will offer the company that sells that product a chance to own this "real-estate" and advertise through these "real" testimonials.

"So why am I doing this instead of, say, flipping burgers?" Jones asked. "Untapping the value of a human experience provides the most extraordinary opportunity of a lifetime. What better, higher line of work could I have than where I could connect two people?"