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Sony-Ericsson Starts US$5M Astroturf Campaign
lairdb writes "The WSJ reports today (31Jul02) that Sony Ericsson will be marketing their new T68i cellphone/camera combo unit via "shills" to create a grassroots buzz. Specific tactics will include fake tourist couples at popular attractions asking bystanders to take their picture, and "leaners": pairs of women ("actresses and female models") at bars playing interactive Battleship with each other from opposite ends of the bar.
"[T]he company has gone to considerable lengths to train it's actors to avoid detection [as Ericsson spokespeople.]""
Most of you people will dismiss this because it's coming from Sony, but were it Microsoft doing something similar you'd be raising all kind of hell.
I'm more worried about Sony that I've been about Microsoft. Sony has its hands on too many things and has shown a willingness to use any means to abuse its position.
-- You see, there would be these conclusions that you could jump to
Before a certain incident which messed up the airline industry pretty bad, my brother held a similar job for one of the major commercial airlines. He was an internet shill for this company. His job was to visit travel websites, message boards, newsgroups, and even AOL travel forums and basically promote his employer as subtlely as possible. The idea was to create a good image of the airline without making it obvious that he worked for them.
He'd make posts under fake names telling stories of how he just used the airline and had a great experience. If he found someone railing on the airline for a particular issue ("my inflight meal was dry") he'd counter it with a positive example ("I flew from LA to Miami last week and the food was great"). Same thing if people were complaining about fares, being bumped, or whatever. He was like an anonymous and multi-faceted PR guy, doing his best to influence peoples opinions of his airline.
I wouldn't doubt that other industries are doing the exact same thing.
Sony-Ericsson is going much further with this, to actually train and pay the people. That's unusual. Those people who hand you invites in clubs seldom get more than free admission. Models who go out in designer outfits often get the outfit as a freebie, but no pay. Many of the wilder haircuts are freebies, too; stylists have to try out their exotic styles on somebody. Ask women with wild haircuts where they got them done; often it's a promotional deal. And almost everybody in the sales end of the rag trade gets promotional deals on clothing.
The net result of this kind of marketing will be to make people suspicious of each other. It is evil. As someone else pointed out, normal demos would do better, except they might be run off by park officials for soliciting.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
When XP and Redhat 7.(2 or 3) came out at about the same time, I went right over to CompUsa to get my copy and as I approached the checkout counter some guy who had been standing near the register with a box of XP excitedly asked the clerk if there was any software for XP, who pointed at the Office XP, etc. in the first rack behind the registers. He ran over and merrily grabbed one of everything that said XP on it and headed back to get in line behind me. The clerk virtually busted out laughing when he saw I was buying Redhat though I didn't get the feeling that he was laughing at me, and he said they had been selling a lot of it. The whole thing with the XP guy just seemed staged, especially after I looked back on my way out and they weren't even ringing up his "purchases". So I don't think using shills to generate fake excitement is anything new.