Tuesday, January 10, 2006

I'd love this product even if I weren't a stealth marketer!

I stumbled across this funny article in the Onion via the WOMMA blog about a stealth marketer really fired up (for once) about the product he is supposed to pretend to like. A short extract: "Normally, if I were hired to viral market a new beverage I wasn't particularly passionate aboutfor example, that new Coca-Cola drink, whatever it's called—I would just subliminally insert favorable comments in two dozen or so high-traffic chat rooms and be done with it. Only a very special product could make me devote a week of evenings to surfing literally hundreds of chat rooms, gaining the confidence of unwitting users by establishing a base of common interests before casually mentioning how I recently tried the most hardcore, carbonated pick-me-up the world has ever seen." As the WOMMA rightly puts it in their cover article, "you know you made it once you are in the Onion" but these are not the practices we will endorse.

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