Use of Student Plants to Pitch Products Rising

theodp wrote to mention a Seattle PI article about software and niche companies using college-age hucksters to get the word about their product out. From the article: "Microsoft is among a growing number of companies seeking to reach the elusive but critical college market by hiring students to be ambassadors -- or, in more traditional terms, door-to-door salesmen. In an age when the college demographic is no longer easily reached by television, radio or newspapers -- as TiVo, satellite radio, iPods and the Internet crowd out the traditional advertising venues -- a microindustry of campus marketing has emerged. Niche firms have sprung up to act as recruiters of students, who then market products on campus for companies such as Microsoft, JetBlue Airways, The Cartoon Network and Victoria's Secret."

Comments

This is the Victoria's Secret thread

[LeonGeeste]

Please confine all "clever" jokes about female college students promoting Victoria's Secret products to this thread and this thread only. Thank you.

Re:This is the Victoria's Secret thread

[Anonymous Coward]

Those are HOOKERS, stupid.

I have an idea to appeal to college students

[assassinator42]

Make your stuff cheaper. In all the colleges/universities. This idea is more for Microsoft, since I don't want Cartoon Network to make their shows cheaper.

Make your stuff cheaper?

[max born]

Title 15, chapter 2, sec 13a of the US Code (Part of the The Clayton Antitrust Act) says it's illegal to:

to sell, or contract to sell, goods at unreasonably low prices for the purpose of destroying competition or eliminating a competitor.

Microsoft needs work, but Adobe needs a miracle

[mister_llah]

Microsoft does make signifigant student discounts, though they certain could make more, Office is still quite expensive for those of us who are broke.

I'd love to see *ADOBE* really cut their prices for students... God forbid an graphic design student actually want to buy a copy of Photoshop...

Not that surprising.

[JayBees]

At Boston University there are 2 ways to afford the tuition: scholarship, or whoring yourself to corporate America. And you don't need to keep a 3.5 GPA to whore yourself to corporate America.

On a related note, I go to BU, and this past week, while crossing the street, I noticed a Microsoft OneNote ad chalked with a stencil on the pavement between the T tracks (the T is what Bostonians call their subway, i.e. train or tram).

From the article: "Many [student representatives] are specially trained, sometimes at corporate headquarters, Gossett said, as in the case with Microsoft."

The T runs above-ground through BU, but the first stop after the campus is underground. So if you are crossing the street and see this chalked advertisement (which is quite blurry and in fact barely legible, because, hey, it rains a lot in Boston and chalk runs), your natural response is to stop walking for a moment so that you can look down and and actually make out what it says. Specifically, you need to stop on the T tracks...50 feet from where the T goes above-ground. Perfect conditions for getting run over with a 20 ton subway car.

That's some nice training, there, Microsoft.