Slashdot Mirror
FTC To Investigate 'Viral Marketing' Practices
mcflaherty writes "The Federal Trade Commission has stated that it is going to investigate the use of 'Viral Marketing' by corporations. This is the type of advertising that seeks to start a word of mouth campaign for the product via consumers themselves. Previously, consumers themselves set the buzz. But lately advertisement firms are stepping up to the plate themselves, seeding the market with buzz that looks independent of the company, but is in fact funded by them. The crew at Penny Arcade contend that corporate generated buzz is not Viral Marketing, and perhaps Guerrilla Marketing would be a more apt term. Either way, it appears to be a profitable advertising model."
Either way, it appears to be a profitable advertising model.
Of course it is, it exploits people's inherent trust for their friends' judgement: "if X says this and X is a nice guy, then X must be true". Only if X is paid by a corporation to spew out nice stuff about some product, it basically wrecks that basic principle of human communication.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
It already has a name. It's called Astroturfing.
Now we need to come up with a term for what will eventually prove to be its opposite. Corporate sabotage that seeks to inspire negative propoganda for another company. If Sony hadn't been repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot with a sawed-off 12 gauge lately and inspiring all their own negative publicity, I'd almost suspect that of their vomit-inducing attempt at creating buzz for the PSP.
A community-oriented lyrics site
60 Minutes covered this about two years ago. It's a good segment if you can find the video.
IS slashdot trying to redeam itself after being conned into an instance of viral marketing?!
See particularly this portion of the comments/story...
I mean, how else are people going to be programmed to buy overpriced, useless crap? Won't you please help a hard-working advertising executive (who has enriched our culture with priceless works of art like this) afford his third Mercedes?
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
Some companies have taken this a step further and are attempting to manipulate the customers themselves into giving good reviews. They are using a technique of improving the quality of their product, causing any sane customer to be unable to respond negatively. These coercive practices must end!
since a) I don't talk to anybody, and b) even if I did, I wouldn't trust what they said.
Sigh.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
No. Let me remind you how our system works:
1. Person finds something they think is cool.
2. Person submits link and story to Slashdot.
3. Slashdot editors do a quick read to see if it's not blatantly inaccurate or uninteresting.
4. Editors put the story up.
5. Readers check the story out.
5. a. At least one reader looks into (or already knows) the background of the article.
5. b. At least one reader looks into (or already knows about) the subject of the article.
5. c. At least one reader looks into (or has already speculated about) the ramifications of the article.
6. We discuss.
That's the point: the community decision for the article you linked was that it was a guerilla campaign. When I read that article, I didn't realize it was such, I assumed the same as the editors. Fortunately, there's a large community here, several of which commented that not all was as it seemed, and I was enlightened.
Yay for community discussion. Articles aren't generally statements that the community makes, they're statements that the community responds to. That's why us old timers (and I'm a young'un, at that) are still here.
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
I'm shocked, shocked I tell you to find that deceptive advertising is going on. I mean it's not like they, as in the ubiquitious they, think people are malleable, easily led astray, brainwashed, etc, etc.
De Beers has the longest running viral marketing campaign in history. It started in the 1880's and is still going strong today.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
My devil's advocate reaction to this is, "not necessarily." If company X didn't have to spend a billion dollars to counteract company Y's $900 million advertising budget, they could use that money to help save consumers dollars. Or they could put it into R&D and engineering to actually make a better product instead of just telling us it's a better product.
Also, I (and a lot of other people) are more than willing to pay a premium for ad-less products. Does anyone remember the days way back when most cable channels didn't have ads? Now you have to pay the cable company for channels with ads, and the channels that don't have ads are very expensive. (Yet notice how they still have a lot of subscribers for that premium.)
I myself don't watch ads on television at all. Every show I want to watch, I either get via iTunes download for $2 a pop (or a season subscription), or by less scrupulous means that I don't want to go into if it's not available by any other means (wink, wink). I have a few small web sites I run for personal reasons, and I buy the hosting space at a reasonable non-free price so that I don't have to subject my visitors to a barrage of ads. I run Firefox with AdBlock so that I can avoid as many ads as possible while browsing the Internet.
I still run across ads now and then, as they're unavoidable in society. The point, though, is that I still spend plenty my share of disposable income, companies still make plenty of money off of me, but they have to do it by actually having products of decent quality that I want or need, not by yelling in both my ears constantly.
In other words, there is another way.
Personally, I think the best advertising any company can have is virtually free. It's from friends who have products and tell me about them. It's from reputable website reviews that describe up-and-coming technology and products. It's from companies' own websites that provide as much real information about products I'm interested in as I need to make an informed decision. All of these things are dirt cheap compared to the billions that companies spend on radio, television and web ads that I never see or hear. Go figure.
Amen.
I'm a grown-up. I don't need the Federal government to protect me from viral advertising.
For my entire life, I've been exposed to celebrity endorsements, and the only effect has been to fine tune my bullshit filter.
Please refund the portion of my taxes that is going to paying these guys salaries.
A simple question in response to your question ...
Why is important to tell people who paid for a political comercial when it was played on TV?
The reason is simple, because it is reasonably simple to mislead people about the source and content of an advertizement. Consider the harm to a political campaign if people started making fake comercials for their opponents in order to make their supporters look stupid ("My name's Dan, and I think all these 'feminists' need is a good ing. I support John Smith because he believes a woman's place is in the kitchen.").
As comercials move away from being in comercial breaks and billboards to product placement and blogs it is important to tell people that they're being advertized to and who is doing the advertizement.
Consider the damage that would be done to the XBox had Sony created a fake blog on how to pick up 12 year old boys on XBox Live (and made sure that this got noticed on major news sites). If Sony got away with it, XBox Live could be killed by people's outrage.