RSS feedHere’s a great article on undercover marketing, utilising ideas from Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point and related research.
SCENARIO NO. 4: The Hasbro company recruited 1,600 cool kids, aged 8 to 10, in Chicago and paid them each $30 to play a new hand-held video game called “Pox” and tell their friends about it.
I read about this when it happened back in 2001, and when the initial anger about brain washing minors subsided, I started to wonder to what depths marketers would sink to, in what they’re now referring to as peer to peer, or p-to-p marketing. This article gives a few examples, but the marketers are saying that they only use people who are genuinely excited about the product they’re promoting, or to put it more directly:
“When I’m running a program for a car company, I want that guy out there to be the living, breathing embodiment of that brand.”
So where does that put us ethically? The line between marketing and enthusiasm starts to become blurred, and when people are rewarded or awarded free goods as opposed to monetary payment for their excellent promotionalenthusiasm skills, what does that mean for us advertising cynics like us? The lines between advertising, promotion and enthusiasm are about to get a lot grayer (U.S. spelling courtesy of the Macquarie Dictionary’s anti-Australian conversational English stance).