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

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people can't be more discerning, especially when they're looking at topics that aren't close to them. If you don't have the insight that enables you to tell marketing from honest opinion, you can only choose a level of general distrust that affects both. Increasing amounts of viral marketing and affiliate advertising will raise that level of distrust and that means people become more cynic, which is not a nice state, if you think about it.

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[suv4x4]

This forces us to be more discerning. How is this a bad thing?

Indeed. And not just that. What kind of advertisement do you prefer: the marketoid speak, bland, noisy, blinking commercial spots rotated a hundred times on every channel every day, or more game-like advertising, which is fun on its own, and tries to show some practical usage of the advertised product?

I personally am sick of the "old school" commercial spots and would trade them for anything any day.

Of course it's important to differentiate deceptive viral marketing (ex. Sony's PSP "blog") and scams (ex. "Neuronet" virtual reality networks) and the harmless reality-game-like advertising, where the creators would reveal themselves as part of the plan (like the Bridezilla spot).

I would really rather them post those videos on their official sites as entertainment marketing their products, but truth is that while this generated hype, people will abuse it. The novelty will wear off and they will move on to a newer technique.

The difference may come as hard to discern in the general case of viral marketing, but quite important.

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[Mike1024]

How is this a bad thing?

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.

By the same logic you could say muggers are good because they force people to be more alert.

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[Anonymous Coward]

Then ask a friend who knows or even one who's a specialist.

If you want a new PC, ask someone who knows those things, etc.

The tendency, of course, should be to educate yourSELF, so you can know more on your own.

Some people like being stupid, and serves them right.

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[tverbeek]

The fact that Anybody At All believed that {LonelyGirl15 was genuine/Taco Bell bought the Liberty Bell/Saddam Hussein had WMDs} demonstrates that people will fall for just about anything.

Deceptive marketing is only good in the sense that chicken pox is good: by exposing people to it and giving them a chance to develop a resistance to it, their chances are improved of not succumbing whe exposed to even worse stuff (i.e. lying political leaders).

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[ultranova]

Then ask a friend who knows or even one who's a specialist.

How does your friend know it ? How can you know his knowledge didn't come from viral marketing ? How do you know the specialist is actually a genuine specialist and not a cleverly placed viral marketeer, and if he is a specialist, that he hasn't been bribed ?

If you want a new PC, ask someone who knows those things, etc.

How do you know he isn't getting paid to recommend Dell or some other crappy brand ? And how do you know I'm not getting paid to say bad things about Dell every chance I get ?-)

The tendency, of course, should be to educate yourSELF, so you can know more on your own.

How can you educate yourself when you have no way of telling truthful sources from viral marketing ?

Some people like being stupid, and serves them right.

Ignorance is not the same as stupidity. Besides that, if you have no way to know which sources to trust, you have no way to get rid of that ignorance. That is the problem with viral marketing.

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[Anonymous Coward]

One word: Tupperware. Marketing is already aiming to exploit existing friendships and peer groups. This is much more problematic online, where people never meet eachother and can start over with hardly a problem if they need to. The circle of people whom you can trust is shrinking because everybody earns a commission these days. The alternative is, as you said: educate yourself. Unfortunately you can't educate yourself to be an expert in every field. There just isn't enough time.

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

[TheRaven64]

I've recently adopted a new strategy when it comes to shopping. Every time I've complained about irritating adverts that tell me nothing about the product, people have pointed to brand recognition as the answer. Studies have shown that people are more likely to buy a brand they recognise than one they don't.

Now, when I don't know anything much about a particular product (e.g. toothpaste), I will choose the brand I recognise the least. If it works, I'll keep using it. If not, I'll switch to a slightly more familiar one. The ones that blare irritating advertising at me will be last on the list.

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[bit01]

Besides that, if you have no way to know which sources to trust, you have no way to get rid of that ignorance. That is the problem with viral marketing.

No, the problem is noise. A message can be compromised by too much noise as well as too little message. That is the problem with viral marketing and marketing in general.

In the real world you do not have the time to all evaluate the messages you receive. You must always trust your sources to greater or lesser extent. Marketing deliberately tries to subvert trusted sources by flooding them out with content free trash. It's no accident that the most successful advertising campaigns tend to be the ones with the most money spent. If the value of messages was inherent that would not be true. An arms race to get mindshare in other words. Everybody loses except the marketing "industry". It's also fraudulent but unfortunately the legal system isn't even close to being able to deal with it.

---

Beware deceptive astroturfers

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[makomk]

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.

Whereas in the blogosphere, there are people who are actually secretly being paid to promote a particular view. Sure, the media may be overpaid fools, but at least you know who's signing their paychecks.

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.

With absolutely no way of telling which is which and no consequences if people get caught. I remember when Slashdot and various blogs got taken in by a misleading press release claiming the Government was trying to make bloggers register (actually about large-scale paid astroturfing campaigns). Surprisingly few people noticed that its source was potentially less than reliable, despite the fact that the chairman of the organisation signing it (and the press release did have his real name on it) actually being in charge of a marketing company known for similar techniques in the past.

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.

Whereas the blogosphere has an anti-establishment tendency - the mainstream media is all lies, and anything written by an apparently independent blogger or grassroots movement is assumed to be true (at least, until someone less lazy than 99% of the bloggers out there tracks down information on the author and discovers they're on the payroll of some marketing/PR outfit or the other). (I'm exaggerating, but only slightly - fake bloggers need to be able to write well and build up a strong following before they can start misleading people effectively.)

The real problem is, most people don't have time to find out what's actually going on (or can't be bothered) - in some cases, it's not even possible, for example when it's happening in a warzone far away. So they trust what other people are saying - and whether that's blogs or the media, the issues are still there. (The other problems are that blogs have even less of an incentive to be unbiased than mainstream news - in fact, most of the big-hitters seem to be built around the idea of telling people what they want to hear. Also, proper investigative reporting is expensive and difficult, and I can't seem bloggers doing it any time soon - though the media doesn't do much these days either.)

Re:This forces us to be more discerning

[Zeinfeld]

Whereas in the blogosphere, there are people who are actually secretly being paid to promote a particular view. Sure, the media may be overpaid fools, but at least you know who's signing their paychecks.

Empirically this is not the case, there have been several Bush administration scandals where journalists turned out to be paid with government (i.e. our) money to propagandize for the GOP.

Product placements are not reported. And the curious silence of the establishment media on the Cunningham scandal in its early days strongly suggests that it was not only politicians that were visiting the Watergat building for the Poker and Hookers parties that court documents allege Brent Wilkes paid for. The number one and number two at the CIA were dismissed as a direct result of that scandal, Foggo for allegedly attending the parties, Porter-Goss for promoting him into that position.

Whereas the blogosphere has an anti-establishment tendency - the mainstream media is all lies, and anything written by an apparently independent blogger or grassroots movement is assumed to be true

Not in the blogs I read. It is routinely assumed that many bloggers are in the direct pay of politicians and campaigns. The same is true on Wikipedia. I have found a few editors there who were very obviously paid shills for a campaign. The Katherine Harris ones being the most amusing, they would be editing in endorsements by politicians who had already made public their refusal to support her. Then they would suddenly disappear and there would be news of a purge by 'Pink Sugar'.

But there are also paid shills and paid shills, I can pretty much guess who wrote many of the wikipedia articles on several Internet security protocols. In some cases people have told me that they wrote them. But its pretty rare that I read one of them and find something blatantly POV. Most people are sensible enough to know that a good article is going to survive much longer than an obvious puff piece.

Its about accountability. If you shill in the blogosphere other people soon find out. You can be a paid shill for Faux news and nobody will say anything against you.

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

Marketing

[MemoryDragon]

Has ruined every medium so far it has touched... This is the rule not the exception!

peer pressure

[gravesb]

If you are so easily influenced by this type of video, maybe there are some other issues besides trust that you need to look at.

If you need someone to do that for you...

[MarkusQ]

...having a pernicious effect on our tendency to trust what seems genuine."

If you haven't had this tendency whacked out of you be daily life you need to get out more, or do something other than stare at a blank wall while you're in.

Seriously. A month of almost any sort of social activity (or twenty minutes in a few bars I know of) should fix it. As should a few year's experience debugging other people's code, working in retail, or even watching nature shows on TV ("Wasps do what?!? That's seriously messed up dude!").

Heck, just open an e-mail account.

If you have a tendency to trust things just because they seem genuine you are in deep, deep trouble. And that fact hasn't changed for millions of years.

--MarkusQ

No, greed does.

[JamesTRexx]

From TFA:
In the long term, developing this kind of skepticism will benefit all Internet users, Mr. Federman says. But in the short term, he says, online deceptions of the "wig-out" video variety have the potential to erode trust in events or moments that seem to be free of artifice or marketing interests.
"If one is always skeptical, then goes to cynicism, you end up feeling pretty negative about the world," Mr. Federman says. "You end up with a very sour disposition. You tend to look at people and interactions as everyone trying to manipulate you, and tend to have a miserable existence, quite frankly.
"It's not pleasant. You can't enjoy yourself. ?You always have to be on your guard."

The core to it is just greed.
Wherever there's a new online trend, be it blogging, home made videos, virtual reality worlds, people want to make money out of it. Just look around in the real world, advertisements everywhere. I can't take a five minute walk in town without coming across numerous ads.
Even worse, I can't take a five minute drive without coming across large ads which to me is inviting danger. I try to ignore them as much as possible, but they do distract from the road where my attention should be. There is legislation about handsfree calling in the car, why's there no legislation against lingerie ads alongside main roads?
Ads are like roaches and crawl under everything that shows a crack. Radio, tv, and now games as well. I stopped listening to radio and watching tv because I got sick of the bad content stuffed with ads. And no, this was not free content as we all pay a contribution to public radio and tv.
In a few years one can't hide from reality by spending a few hours on games because they'll be loaded with ads.
And now reality gets abused by greedy people producing "real" content.

I really wish people could just let things be what they are and not manipulate it for money. There are more important things in life than making a shitload of money.

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?

Re:Drop the "viral"

[BrokenHalo]

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

What does 9/11 have to do with the price of fish? For that matter, what was so special about 9/11?

I know the politicians of our day like to beat up the terrorism issue as if it was something new, despite the fact that it has literally thousands of years of history, but those same politicians are the first to use the most scurrilous tactics the marketroids can devise.

On the other foot

[Joebert]

The company behind the latest You Tube video sensation would like you to know this: It was never the intention to portray anything other than a dramatization.

In that case, I suppose they'll understand if I create videos that make it appear products like theirs ruined my life, dropping hints to make people think of their products & post them in the same mannor as their videos.

Afterall, it's only a dramatization.

Sad thing is, I'm willing to bet I'd have cease and desist or face legal consequences letters sent to me faster than I could imagine by doing so.

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.