Viral Marketing Breeding Cynicism

New Media Blogger writes "First Lonelygirl15, now Bridezilla. Canada's National Post provides an interesting perspective on the newest trend of using viral videos as marketing tools, and how these fake blogs or 'flogs' are having a pernicious effect on our tendency to trust what seems genuine."

Comments

This forces us to be more discerning

[lecithin]

How is this a bad thing?

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[Alef]

How is this a bad thing?

I read somewhere that the trust people place in random strangers is a very important property for a well functioning society. It allows transactions to run smoothly. If you always expect to get scammed, getting anything done would be a nightmare. (Game theory is probably applicable here.) Interestingly, the research also indicated that it is more important that people trust each other than that they actually can trust each other -- that is, it is the perceived ability to trust others that matters. That is why this is a bad thing.

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[Zeinfeld]

If it creates both (a) discerning people and (b) the need for people to be discerning, it seems disingenuous to praise it for making people more discerning.

If you watch any network TV program these days you will see paid product placements inside the shows. The actors dunking their Oreo cookies in their morning coffee are paid to say that they are their favorite.

People who complain about the blogosphere are almost always doing so because they have a vested interest in keeping people stupid. They don't want people to be questioning the beltway 'reporters' like Tim Russert who last week admitted that he automatically considers high government officials to be on background and clearly treats their statements as unassailable gospel truth rather than as self interested claims which are at best likely to be half truths and are quite likely outright lies.

Because of overpaid fools like Russert there was no resistance when the Bush Administration blundered into Iraq with a plan that many experts including the army chief of staff considered to be half baked.

The point of the blogosphere is not to exclude views, it is to include them. You can find every view on the blogosphere including the paid product placements and specious punditry you find in the mainstream media. But you also find the views the mainstream media don't publish.

The blogosphere is largely a US phenomenon because the US media is by far the worst in the Western world.

Everyday the mainstream media interviews far right idiots like Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, hatemongers like Bill Donahue, Pat Robertson etc. etc. etc. I have never once seen Chomsky interviewed in the past five years. And the only question the media asks itself is 'are we being too liberal'. There is a huge market for left and centrist pundits such as Paul Krugman but they don't get booked.

And the idea of having politicians on the talk shows rather than unaccountable pundits simply does not seem to have occurred. Every weekend five or six politicians drawn from the same pool of 15 'A-list' talking heads appear.

Its not simply a right wing bias though, its an establishment bias. In the early Gingrich years I had several exchanges with his staff. At the time they were the disruptors and the establishment was shutting them out. In another ten years the centrist Democrats will be the establishment and everyone else will be shut out, or rather that is what would happen if there was a mainstream media in ten years time which there probably will not be.

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[Anonymous Coward]

You might not even notice that you're at the online equivalent of a "Tupper party". Some referral links are pretty sneaky. It isn't always obvious what is just a product or subsection id and what is an affiliate id. Even if you can tell, would you deny your friend a referral bonus? Sometimes the bonus is split among the referrer and the referred, making it even harder to say no to affiliate marketing.

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[Elemenope]

As Postman pointed out, laws were created to deal with advertisinbg at a time when all advertisments were expected to make factual truth-claims about their product; false advertising was when an advertiser make a false or erroneous factual claim in their advert about their product. When advertising became about image rather than facts, adverts for the most part ceased to make truth-claims at all. Thus, all those laws no longer apply.

Since many economists have pointed out recently that no economy can function efficiently when the participants have poor knowledge of the transaction and poor knowledge of the product, perhaps capitalism owes it to itself to enourage truth-claims in advertising again, and perhaps sanction or eschew ads that do not. What sort of regulatory mechabnism that might entail I dare not think about, but it might be a start.

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[speculatrix]

indeed. take a look at the countries where corruption is rife such as the Congo, and you'll see some of the poorest countries, despite large quantities of aid being injected very little of it filters down to the people who need it, and very little money is invested in the future because corruption at the highest level means it is impossible to get a return on investment. There's no benefit to working hard if the local gov't officials discover a new tax to take everything you've got. Inflation is also usually a massive problem because people can't even trust their money - I have witnessed people trying to buy a washing machine in Zimbabwe dollars, and needing several large backpacks to carry the cash, and taking hours to count it!

trust in society is a vital glue, whether stopping to help a stranger in trouble, or running a shop and expecting that the dollars being offered for the goods on sale are both genuine and have a stable value for future trade.

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[tilde_e]

The problem with this is that there are a lot of rebranded things, or sub-brands if you will. Odwalla is Coca-cola now, etc. So you need to also check who distributes that toothpaste because it might say J&J or Colgate in the fine print! Companies can produce new brands on a whim these days... but luckily they tend to be shelved not too far away from all the things you did recognize from that vendor. I've also seen knock-offs that are actually produced by the company they appear to be competing against.

For a sub-brand example, Santitas looks nothing like Frito-Lay at first glance on a store shelf: http://www.fritolay.com/fl/flstore/cgi-bin/product s_santitas.htm

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[Qzukk]

Depends on your goals behind such purchase decisions. If you want to put the company out of business, then you'll have to check real hard, especially with the number of companies all shared by the giant conglomerates (like Colgate-Palmolive, or Ralston Purina, or Kraft... the list goes on and on). If you just want them to change their ways, then if enough people are preferring the less-advertised sub-brand over the heavily advertised main brand, then rational companies would decide that the sub-brands are doing something right and try to do that more often. Which would hopefully mean less advertising, and not heavy advertisement of their popular new brand (formerly the sub-brand).

Flogging Flaunters

[romland]

Well, call me a troll, but...

Personally I have my doubts as to how many viewers/readers of these blogs actually stop to think whether they are genuine or not, moreover, I wonder how many actually cares. Personally I don't read any personal blogs of people I don't know unless they are of a more technical or "factual" nature (a simple example would be "AmigaOS 15 released, click here to get it!"). Now, these kind of topics are sure prone to be marketing stunts but chances are I don't even know about them then. Much less read them.

An exception is of course when I KNOW that it's a marketing stunt, then I might start reading it just for giggles.

And as always a lot of people will say something along the lines of "If there's money involved, look at it with a critical eye" now. Well, that kind of bollocks sure is true, but I think most of us actually DO look at it critically, without even knowing it.

To get to the point, I really have to ask the people who get upset at these kind of blogs to reevaluate their lives.

Drop the "viral"

[Guppy06]

and the title is still true.

When will the nation learn that we cannot abide with marketing in this post-9/11 world?

Genuine Information

[Jekler]

I believe the Viral Marketing and Stealth Marketing trends will eventually lead us down the road to Informed Marketing. We'll reach a point where we no longer wish to be entertained or distracted by commercials, but rather, the commercials which give us the most accurate and detailed information about a product will be the most successful.

We're not there yet, and I think that has a lot to do with the newness of information technology. The vast majority of the internet world are like 3-year olds. They are testing the boundaries of the virtual world, learning how this works with that, feeling, walking, and speaking for the first time. I think these are going to be short-lived trends. Maybe 20 to 30 years, but in the long run, all of this is nothing more than a novelty of our current generation.

Welcome to Plato's cave

[Richard Kirk]

We cannot tell whether any particular fact is true. All we can do is to try and see how well anything we are told fits in with everything else we know. Suppose, for instance, we were told on a webpage that water freezes at 0 Celsius. We can get a thermometer and some water, and some ice, and do an experiment. All that tells us is that the people who write the web pages are somehow in collusion with the people who make thermometers. Or, at an even lower level, they are colluding with the people who write the dictionary terms for 'water' and 'thermometer'. Or the rules of grammar that determine that the description has a single, unambiguous distinction.

Okay, water does not always freeze at 0 celsius. Zero celsius is the triple point of water. When you actually do the experiments, or make your own observations, then you often find you have to refine the terms. I am not really talking about that. What I am trying to do is to make a distinction between what is 'true' and what is 'false'. We can define 'truth' so strictly that nothing we ever say is precisely 'true'. For the pruposes of this argument, I am going to relax a bit, and argue that statements can be 'true'.

How do we determine whether something is 'true'. Some scientific and mathematical statements are subject to proof or experiment, but we do not usually resort to this. With questions of historical fact, we can sometimes examine the raw evidence (but how 'raw' is that?). Most of the time, what we do is to see whether the new fact is compatible with what we already know. Knowledge has been likened to a boat which never comes into port: but is repaired by the crew using driftwood and materials found at sea. It would be difficult to completely remake the boat becaue it can never come into dock, but it an change over time by gradually expanding or replacing one component at a time. Over time, the whole boat's material may be replaced with new parts, and the whole crew may be replaced by their children, but the sense of their being a boat is preserved.

We should have some suspicion of everything we see and hear. Nothing is ruled above suspicion. However, you may remember the eposode of 'Kung Fu' where two adepts are guided by a venerable old man down a path where they are then robbed. They were both asked what they had learned from the event. The one who replied "trust no-one" was rejected from the monastery. "Expect the unexpected" was the better answer. Without some sort of discernment, there is no difference between the people who deny the Apollo project, and the people who deny the holocaust.

So, what is special about the web? Nothing, really, other than its newness and its versatility. We can post images and videos as well as text, but we also know we can manipulate images and fake videos. I can remember how authoratative some documents looked when printed out using variable-width fonts, when this was rare and expensive. Books tend to be trusted, because they are permanent, and therefore could have been criticised or edited as necessary. However, Erich von Daniken wrote books full of easily refutable facts. One of my favourites was how the island of Elephantine could have only been recognized as the exact shape of an elephant from a flying saucer. It isn't the shape of an elephant at all, as Google maps can show you - it got its name from the ivory trade. Going electronic has probably shortened the gap between posting something and posting the refutation, but the basic mechanism is the same.

Can we make something that gets people wary of clicking on random links, and falling for scams? That is where the scepticism is really needed.

Re:Trust is not the problem...

[Eli Gottlieb]

You're full of shit. There's a damned large difference between merely describing events as they happened (what modern history classes do) and explicitly teaching kids not to judge anything.

Furthermore, English class practically exists to teach kids that all points of view are not equally valid -- that teachers are right by nature and students wrong by nature. Somehow I don't think that kind of "judgement" teaches kids much of anything, either.

What they should really teach is Logic.

Now we get classes on S&M. What schools did you attend? I'd like to enroll.