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Has the iPhone backlash arrived yet? If not, let's get started.

Here's a product that is six months away from actually being on the market. It promises to be a nice cellphone-slash-e-mail checker. It doesn't really do anything revolutionary. It just promises to be easy to use, to raise the bar for general glossiness, and to be very expensive. That's it.

Now consider what happened last week. In Las Vegas, every major technology company and 150,000 techies had gathered to release products and drum up publicity at the biggest North American event on their calendar, the Consumer Electronics Show. Every major company, that is, except one: Apple, which, as usual, boycotted the proceedings and held its own refusenik convention up the coast in San Francisco.

There, Apple CEO Steve Jobs gets up on stage, waves a prototype iPhone in the air, and every self-respecting publication in the world drops everything and slaps it on the front page. In terms of publicity, the vastly larger gathering in Las Vegas was blown off the map. Reporters were leaving Vegas and flying to San Francisco. Jobs had upstaged the whole tech world.

Apple gets a lot of credit for its marketing genius, from its clever co-opting of the creative class (apparently, you're not allowed to make music unless it's on a Mac) to that cultish music player (apparently, you're not allowed to listen to music unless it's on an iPod).

Sure enough, like any cult, Apple has its share of adoring websites, from the encyclopedic product history inscribed at Apple-History.com and apple2history.org, to the complete coverage of Wired News' Cult of Mac blog (blog.wired.com/cultofmac/).

What Apple doesn't get nearly enough credit for, though, is being a master of viral marketing. When you think of "viral video," the entertaining pieces of Web video that you pass around to your friends, the company seldom springs to mind. But looked at from another angle, you could define a "viral" as any piece of promotion that stays in circulation without requiring infusions of advertising money. Apple has worked wonders here.

How? For one thing, the company is compulsively secret about its forthcoming products.

Everybody loves a secret, so naturally, there's an entire industry of Apple rumour sites that are solely devoted to stoking talk about future products. They provide an endless supply of covert reports from unnamed sources; the fact that Apple threatens to fire and prosecute employees who leak company secrets only adds to the intrigue.

The sites are rabidly followed by merchants, analysts, hacks and fan boys alike. As I write, Apple Insider) is speculating on the possibility of a Super Bowl ad that might announce a reconciliation between Apple and Apple Corps (which owns the Beatles catalogue), which have been feuding over their mutual trademark.

Meanwhile, MacRumors.com features a handy buyer's guide, which predicts whether the Apple product you're thinking of spending too much money on will be replaced next week.

The rumour sites and the clandestine company are adversaries in theory, but they're really part of the same promotional ecosystem. Everybody involved has drunk deeply of the fruit-flavoured Kool-Aid. All Apple has to do is throw around the occasional lawsuit (a third major site, ThinkSecret.com, was a recent target), and, I suspect, enough false leads to throw them off, and they provide an endless supply of buzz for little investment.

Moreover, the Apple publicity machine has yielded accidental opportunities for creative types to pitch in. Take the iPhone. The product was rumoured for years. The catch was, nobody had seen it or even knew what shape it was.

As a result, veritable procession of fake iPhone (and, formerly, video iPod) photos surfaced online, each claiming to represent the elusive gadget's actual form. None were close -- they were all ill-informed Photoshop fabrications -- but each one made the rounds and kept people chattering.

And then there are the Apple ads. In the past few years, Apple has released two distinctive series of ads that have wormed their way into pop culture: First, the "Switcher" ads that featured attractive people delivering monologues about why they ditched their PCs for Macs.

(One of these featured a winsome girl named Ellen Feiss, whose performance gave such an impression of being influenced by banned substances that she spawned an Internet following of her own. See ellenfeiss.net, and try searching for her on YouTube while you're at it.)

Then came the "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" spots, which feature cult-hero comedian John Hodgman as a befuddled anthropomorphic PC, opposite actor Justin Long as a smarmy, too-hip Mac that most people seem to want to punch.

Whatever their effectiveness as advertising, all three lend themselves to imitation by being formulaic, stylized and simple: It's pretty easy to film two people against a white backdrop, play the Apple music and have the results be instantly recognizable.

So people hop on the bandwagon. A YouTube search for "Apple Parody" yields hundreds of results, ranging from a guy encouraging Americans to switch to Canada, to a funny account of all the fun a PC gamer had by switching to Macs, which are notoriously lousy game machines. (He tries to enumerate good Mac games: "Zork, Breakout. . . Super Breakout. . . Photoshop. . .") They're not all positive, to be sure. But a homage to a brand's style is ahomage to the brand itself, and every last drop of it is advertising that Apple didn't pay for. I write this, realizing that I'm part of the problem, not part of the solution.

So let's start the iPhone backlash, before I start itching to buy one.

webseven@globeandmail.com