Viral Marketing Breeding Cynicism 154
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."
Who's the bitch now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Sometimes that "really interesting video on youtube"
Marketing (Score:4, Insightful)
peer pressure (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This forces us to be more discerning (Score:5, Insightful)
If you need someone to do that for you... (Score:4, Insightful)
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
Re:This forces us to be more discerning (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Marketing (Score:3, Insightful)
It has that potential, but come on: I watched the video 10 mins ago after I read this article (i.e. I already knew it's fake). I still enjoyed it a lot and laughed at some moments.
Not everything should be "real" for it to be enjoyable. And not everything should be void of marketing and product placement to be enjoyable too.
The devil's in the details as always, and how well all goals the creators had play together to form a coherent and fun final product.
Re:This forces us to be more discerning (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
No, greed does. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:This forces us to be more discerning (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Drop the "viral" (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:This forces us to be more discerning (Score:4, Insightful)
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 ?
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 ?-)
How can you educate yourself when you have no way of telling truthful sources from viral marketing ?
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 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This forces us to be more discerning (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org]
Re:This forces us to be more discerning (Score:4, Insightful)
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:No, greed does. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:This forces us to be more discerning (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Uncanny valley (Score:3, Insightful)
This is a problem for advertisers, as the conclusion or argument of an ad used to simply be "buy me," but in the current digital age it has resorted to simply "watch me." (Listen to the "Commercial Bowl" episode from the Princeton Review LSAT Podcast [princetonreview.com] for a good review of this principle. In order to be seen, the ad must not seem like an ad. Unfortunately, or maybe even ironically, the less it looks like an ad the more it is likely to be viewed with skepticism and cynicism.
What's the solution? Some might argue product placement or something like it, something inseperable from the content. This solves the "watch me" problem, but not the cynicism problem. Perhaps the solution is simply to go back to "this show brought to you by brand x thingamabobs." Be open about it, get people to want your product based on the art you support. That's one approach.
I'm interested to see where advertising goes in the next decade or two. It's almost certain to look nothing like what we are used to today.
Re:This forces us to be more discerning (Score:2, Insightful)
The subconscious mind is continuously looking to satiate the conscious minds needs. Advertising operates on the premise that if you get to a child before they are of age you can destroy that fine line between need and want, and sell more. It becomes easier to convince an adult they need a guitar if you convince them as a child they need McDonalds, in other words.
First, you need to know what you need. That prioritizes above all else. Once you know what you need, then you move onto what you want. Wants fall into two categories; things you've always wanted, and things you didn't know you wanted. For example, I'v always wanted to upgrade my box for the last 2 years. I could've, but I decided I needed a car more so I invested money in a car instead. When I get cash left over, I usually save it until I feel financially safe enough I can go out and satiate my wants. Once those long-term wants are satiated, then I can go out and begin satiating things I'v had a curiosuity about or didn't know I wanted.
Culturjamming basically is walling yourself off. If all I want, right now, is a pair of inserts and some foot powder for my boots, then that's all I want. I'll walk into wally world and buy just that, while listening to radio and wearing yellow tinted glasses. Nothing gets to me then and I'm free to have control over my mindshare while in the store.
Re:Drop the "viral" (Score:2, Insightful)
In the old days, when Truth-In-Advertising laws were made, all kinds of people assumed that advertising would make falsifiable claims of fact about the products in question. That's the "good" kind of marketing -- designed to both inform and persuade. You can fact-check it even when it lies.
Nowadays, marketing is more about image than anything. You can no longer debunk an advertisement, because after analysis most of the ad boils away as factually insubstantial. This is "bad" marketing -- designed to persuade without informing. In the worst cases, the advertising contains so little real information that the firm that comissioned the marketing doesn't gain any additional sales!
Cell-phone ads in the newspaper ("XYZ has the least dropped calls...") are Good Marketing. Viral advertising (Graffiti of kids with a new video-gaming handheld.) and the tripe aired during the Super Bowl (two men accidentally "kiss" while eating a candy bar) are Bad Marketing. There is a difference, and society could get rid of the bad and leave the good rather simply.
Re:No, greed does. (Score:3, Insightful)
Capitalism & marketing (Score:2, Insightful)
A bit more about why this is a distortion of markets:
One of things assumed in capitalism is equity of knowledge, and linked to this, one of the causes of market failure is a lack thereof. This is why we have things like laws against insider trading, lemon laws(for used cars & homes) etc. It is the reason we have a right to get angry at big tobacco... it's not that they simply didn't know it was bad, it's that they did know and kept it from us to keep making money. Marketing is a major source of mis-framed information, or even sometimes misinformation(though there are laws against outright lies in marketing) both of which cause us to make choices which are not actually in our best interest. This type of problem is further exasterbated by the increasing trend of being able to buy & make shills of news companies, and viral marketing(especially without disclosure).
It's an arms race, however you look at it. (Score:2, Insightful)
The only solution I have for that is to hold a severe grudge against their products. Thus, companies like SCO, Sony, HP, Lexmark and Microsoft are ones I will never willingly give money to any longer. Granted, their transgressions weren't all advertising related, but exactly the same principle applies--it's a "grim trigger" strategy one way or the other.
That said, there's still something of an arms race. They won't ever stop thinking up new tricks and I have no intention of putting up with whatever new tricks they come up with. If they just want to let us know that they had good products, that's one thing, but some modern marketing techniques are based upon psychological tricks to manipulate people and I won't put up with that.
Re:This forces us to be more discerning (Score:3, Insightful)
1) All advertisements must:
a) Clearly and distinctly state the full name of the company selling the product
b) State if that company is a subsidiary, division, etc. of a larger company and that parent company's name
c) Clearly identify the product being advertised
d) Clearly state the function and or purpose of the product
e) Clearly state any adverse risks associated with the product
f) Clearly identify anyone other than the aforementioned companies involved in funding/sponsoring the advertisement
g) Clearly, distinctly, and understandably state the legally required disclaimers (no fast talking, no low volume overlays, etc.)
h) Present a view of the product as sold or provided (no lacquered hamburgers, no plastic french fries)
i) Clearly indicate that the marketing is an advertisement
2) All advertisements must not:
a) Use any form of direct or indirect sexual association to influence the viewer
b) Make any statement that expresses or implies any false information
c) Present themselves as being and/or representing any entity other than the company selling the product and the company(s) funding the advertisement
d) Target marketing to anyone under 18 years of age (Toy manufactures and companies producing children's products may make the advertising appealing to minors, provided that the full information is also included for the adult making the purchasing decision)
e) Present advertising in any form that purports to be a show or entertainment
e) Attempt to make advertising invasive, obtrusive, obnoxious, annoying, or any form of public nuisance
I'm sure there are more rules available, but these are my biggest pet peeves with the "marketing" being shoved at us from every direction.