12.14.06

Advertising is a Blight

Posted in News, Internet at 11:42 pm by Joe Blubaugh

Or: Sapping the will of the populace

So, I found out that the FTC is probably going to start requiring “viral” marketers to identify themselves as such. That’s good news, because such marketing (I like to call it guerilla marketing) has been eroding trust in opinions for too long already. I read a book by Paco Underhill a few years ago called Why We Buy that alerted me to the practice. In an example cited by Underhill, kids as young as twelve years old were being paid to promote toys to their friends. They weren’t paid in money but rather in things like free toys, backpacks, and sports equipment. When twelve year olds can’t even trust their friends to give them an honest opinion, the world has truly gone mad.

I bring this up because I’ve noticed the practice happening increasingly across the internet. Sony hired the scum of the earth, Zipatoni, to try to prop up the PSP. Zipatoni promptly created a blog purpoting to be run by people who desperately wanted a PSP for Christmas. The blog is gone now, vanished in a haze of gamer-induced shame, or I’d link to it and show you what a disgusting attempt to mimic real, personal writing it is. I’m glad gamers are still outraged about being cynically manipulated.

Word of mouth is the most powerful force in the consumer market today. People, being constantly bombarded by billboards, radio spots, Flash banners, and TV commercials, are tuning more and more of them out. We still trust the opinions of our friends and family though. I didn’t really want an iPod until my brother bought one and I saw how cool it really was. You can’t buy that kind of publicity. Well, not until recently.

With the advent of TiVo, podcasts, and various other technologies that allow you to skip or miss ads entirely, companies are getting desperate to manipulate people into buying their products through emotional attachment rather than an actual, reasoned decision. They’re creating and purchasing what used to be the consumer’s reward to good companies: great word-of-mouth. That’s why I don’t read customer reviews very often. They’re seeded by paid advertisers. The same goes for message boards, blog comments, and a lot of other things that used to belong to the public-at-large. These people disgust me - everything advertisers touch turns to dust. Once the web has become another ad-covered hell, where will we run next?

There’s another good example of this in Arrested Development, but liquor companies have been using this tactic since the 1930s when Smirnoff broke vodka to America: Lindsay is paid to sit in a bar, drink a new liquor and comment about how much she likes it. It’s hilarious: “This is so good, I hardly have any judgment left at all.” These sort of seeds are used all over the place today, but their roots go back a long way.

Advertising at the beginning of the 20th century was primarily informative: ads were viewed as a dialog, a way to convince your consumer that your product’s quality, features, etc. were better for them than the competitors. This sort of ad lives on today mostly in sales of expensive equipment to customers. Medical equipment advertising, for example, is primarily fact-based: “Our MRI machine has twice as many channels.” The more an item costs (with glaring exceptions like automobiles), the less likely viral, emotional advertising is to work.

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