Have I ever mentioned this cool Web site I found? It’s called Half.com. My niece told me about it – she’s in college, and she buys “all her books there. Or at least lots of them, including textbooks. Once she found a copy of “All the President’s Men” for 2 cents!
Oh, speaking of politics, remember that guy in Washington who called TiVo “God’s machine”? Well, we just got Comcast’s new DVR – it’s just like TiVo – and he was so right! We can pause live TV, and do our own instant replays. I can see for myself if the ump blew a call, and I don’t miss any of that fast talk on “West Wing.”
If I sound like I’ve suddenly been replaced by a promotional pod person, no need to fear. I wasn’t paid a cent for either of those tips, except by my newspaper. (And they’re worth every penny I wasn’t paid for them.)
But if you’re wondering why any disclaimer was necessary, maybe you haven’t paid attention to one of the latest trends in marketing: using word-of-mouth from legions of “real consumers” to promote whatever you sell.
There’s no question it works – that’s why the approach has grown swiftly in popularity in recent years.
But there are real questions about the ethics, consequences, and even the legality of some of these “real people” practices – a point highlighted last week when a tiny watchdog group called for an investigation by the Federal Trade Commission.
The group, Commercial Alert, of Portland, Ore., aimed its complaint broadly – maybe too broadly – at strategies known by various names: Buzz marketing. Word-of-mouth marketing. Viral marketing. Guerrilla marketing. Stealth marketing.
The complaint asks a question that has always dogged these techniques: If you enlist “real people” to market your products in their everyday encounters, aren’t the rest of us real people at risk of being deceived?
It’s a crucial question to those who worry that marketing already intrudes too much on our lives, as advertisers continually look for new ways to get messages heard.
Many of those tactics are annoying, but at least they’re obvious. Do I now have to wonder whether my niece was paid to mention Half.com?
“No. I promise,” Ruth assured me when I called. She said a friend recommended Half.com – it’s what everybody on campus uses “because the bookstore’s so expensive.”
Well, could the friend have been paid? Unlikely. “I don’t know anybody who’s ever been paid to recommend stuff,” she told me.
Like me, she’s never thought to ask. But perhaps we should – a point I realized later as I talked to Mark Hughes of Swarthmore, whose book “Buzzmarketing” came out in July and who owns a marketing firm with the same name.
Hughes, coincidentally, was a cofounder of Half.com, now owned by eBay. He says it was built with buzz – all above board, if a little bizarre.
Half.com put ads inside fortune cookies, and on the rubber mats inside urinals. Its coup was persuading Halfway, Ore., to change its name to Half.com. Each tactic served a simple goal: to get people talking about the Web site in a positive way.
Hughes echoes the position of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association, formed in part to counter the bad buzz created by some well-publicized “stealth” campaigns, such as one that put actors posing as tourists in places such as the Empire State Building.
The goal was to generate talk about a new camera phone, then still a novelty, by asking real sightseers to take the fake tourists’ pictures.
Hughes deplores that campaign as “plain old deception.” I’d add that it bought buzz at the cost of coarsening one of modern life’s sweet little civilities.
The Word of Mouth Marketing Association says it opposes “all forms of stealth and deception.” Its version of word-of-mouth is about making customers sincerely happy and talkative, says the group’s CEO, Andy Sernovitz.
Maybe so. But what about a marketer, not a member of that group, that quietly enlists an army of 250,000 well-chosen teens? Next Monday, I’ll tell you about Procter & Gamble’s Tremor.
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