Nov 07
23

I cry for my industry

10 Comments

I just got through reading The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos along with a chunk of the over 350 comments on TechCrunch and it has frankly ruined my day.

I spend a lot of time talking to people about social media, earned media and the democratization of communication channels. I buy into a lot of the blue sky thinking that being awesome gets noticed and I truly want to help my clients be awesome and to earn the attention paid to them.

There was a harsh light shined by Dan and his Commotion Group on the practice and discipline of viral marketing tactics, let’s call it putting the disease back into viral,  specifically:

- Paying bloggers to post
- Spamming Forums
- Thumbnail spamming
- Misleading titles and tags
- Manufacturing comments via multiple accounts

I am no naive kid and I knew this was going on, but largely figured it was the tactics of the pharmaceutical fringe and would be largely rejected by any reputable client or marketer. Not so, it would appear that Commotion works with some bigger name brands, that I would expect more from. It was the comments that really got me though, there was a load of negative reactions, but also a surprising amount of support (and yes, I fully expect that a lot of the supporting comments were manufactured by the very company in question). Regardless, the ability of these people to sleep at night astounds me.

Today I cry for the innocence I have lost, for the many damned souls in this soulless advertising profession, but most I cry for the pathetic clients prepared to plumb new depths of immorality to manufacture hype.

And to those who find no ethical issue with these practices, I sentence you to read through the comments on the TechCrunch post where others have said it all better than I could.

It is enough to make me want to leave advertising for the fifth time.

[tags]Techcrunch, Commotion Group,  viral, spam[/tags]

This entry was posted on November 23, 2007 at 2:40 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Posted in Advertising Attention Culture Issues Online Opinion Personal Social Media Trends Viral Word of Mouth agencies by dwalker 10 Comments

10 Responses to "I cry for my industry"

  • DaveW. says:
    November 23, 2007 at 3:28 pm

    Is “social media” becoming an oxymoron like “Facebook friend”?

    Seth Godin wrote a bit about the difference between viral marketing and word of mouth:

    “Word of mouth is a decaying function. A marketer does something and a consumer tells five or ten friends. And that’s it. It amplifies the marketing action and then fades, usually quickly.

    Viral marketing is a compounding function. A marketer does something and then a consumer tells five or ten people. Then then they tell five or ten people. And it repeats. And grows and grows. Like a virus spreading through a population. The marketer doesn’t have to actually do anything else.”

    According to this definition, is what DAG doing viral marketing or WOM? My guess is that this is mostly a decaying function.

  • Leesa Barnes says:
    November 23, 2007 at 6:25 pm

    What’s troubling is that any viral marketing campaign that has legs and gets popular will be scrutinized with a fine tooth comb. While being a skeptic is natural in our over-hyped world, each viral marketing campaign will be seen as guilty until proven innocent because of Dan’s revelations over on TechCrunch.

  • Leigh says:
    November 24, 2007 at 6:19 am

    did you notice in the Techcrunch comments that someone went to Dan’s linkedin site and pulled a list of the clients he has for commotion and posted them? Interestingly enough, I went to check it out and the names appear to be disappeared….

    Funny that…..

  • Dave Fleet says:
    November 24, 2007 at 8:55 am

    I agree, Doug. I wrote about this on my blog when I first saw it a couple of days ago – I find Greenberg’s tactics disgusting.

    I was also quite worried that a fair number of commenters on the site seemed to think the practices were ok (although how many of those were from Dan’s own company, we’ll never know). This is the sort of thing that gives marketers and PR professionals a bad name.

    @Leigh – Google’s cache is a wonderful thing.

  • Wildfire Strategic Marketing | (3i) » The great viral swindle? says:
    November 24, 2007 at 10:48 am

    [...] in our field, and the post just confirmed it, but felt I had to do so when I realized that too many people in our industry were surprised (vs. the ‘regular folks’ in the TC comments who were [...]

  • King Tut says:
    November 25, 2007 at 3:31 am

    “I am no naive kid and I knew this was going on…”

    Nahh, you are naive.

    And don’t know what’s going on.

    Did you stick your head in the sand about all the info on how the MySpace hype was generated? Or did you come to the Internet after MySpace was created?

    Kinda big red flashing lights with that one…don’tcha think?

  • dwalker says:
    November 25, 2007 at 9:36 am

    Thanks for the psych analysis, KT.

    Always a pleasure to hear from someone I have never met, who hasn’t taken the time to get to know me, yet still feels qualified to make sweeping and incorrect generalizations.

  • Steve Wright says:
    November 26, 2007 at 8:25 am

    I wonder how long it will be until Comotion’s clients wake up and realise they’re paying for what amounts to a really lousy marketing campaign?

    Comotion is basically in the business of duping a large yet uninterested audience into watching videos that apparently have little to do with their clients’ brands (in Comotion’s own words, “Generally, a concept should not be forced because it fits a brand. Rather, a brand should be fit into a great concept”). huh? Why not just launch a Youtube in-video advertising campaign and save yourself some production bucks?

    If a traditional media buying co. or ad agency suggested this type of untargeted shotgun strategy they’d be asked off the account in about a half second.

    Who cares if Comotion can generate a large audience? How many viewers actually matched the client’s target demo? How many were turned off the brand once they realised they’d been duped? And how many were left simply shaking their heads wondering what the hell that was all about?

    Greenberg’s a TA at Stanford studying management science & engineering… in other words, marketing strategies are probably not his strength but like a good engineer he’s found a hack to scam the system.

  • Sami says:
    February 12, 2008 at 3:01 pm

    Re the King Tut comment and response. D, you don’t seem to have qualms about judging and analyzing the behavior of others publicly.

    In this very post you’ve called out Dan with your own judgement. Why should your readers be not allowed to do the same?

    Further to this I wonder what you’d think if we starting linking to your blog with quotes like the arab remark on your recent attack on the major airline corp.

  • dwalker says:
    February 12, 2008 at 4:01 pm

    Thanks for stopping by Sami. I will apologize to you directly, as I have generally for the Arab comment. I intended the comment to expose a stereotype, but failed miserably and ended up offending people. I regret the decision and would remove it, but I have a policy of not editing the content of my posts after the fact without noting it.

    Both I and all readers are entitled to comment how they will, but I expect that provocative comments from either side will be met by similar thoughts from the other.

    The King Tut post got under my skin, because he was making comments about me personally and my character traits and I reacted emotionally – I do that sometimes. I felt he was not qualified to make those judgments.

    I can’t say that I enjoy being taken to task, but I learn from it and that is good thing. I make no apologies for my post above. I am calling out Dan because by my judgment what he is doing is unethical, he and others like yourself are entitled to point out my hypocrisies. I don’t claim to know everything about everything, but I believe that the purpose of blogging is to air points of view.

    Don’t like what I have to say or my tone? Then do what Sami does above and call me out, or post yourself or decide not to read this blog. I am interested in the conversation and don’t feel that what I write is the first or last word on anything, just my POV.

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