Viral Marketing
I was walking on Newbury Street in downtown Boston with Erica the other day, ogling the passers-by by whom we were passing. We had this fantastic advertising idea: what if, say, the Gap paid people to walk around downtown and notice when you're wearing Gap clothes, then come up to you and say, "I love your jacket!" That would sure get people buying Gap clothes...
You see where this is headed. It turns out that the evil geniuses in the world of selling you shit already came up with this idea. The kicker for me is that they came up with it three years ago! There's a company called BzzAgent here in Boston that pays people to sell products to their friends in casual conversation. The idea is that you do this anyway: something like 25% of casual conversations contain some product reference. They just pay people to do it. There are caveats, of course, like you should tell your friends that you get paid to sell them shit, and people only sell shit they like. This does not make me feel any better about this being an industry. Not to mention that they thought of it three years before I did. Damn! I hate it when that happens!
We all know that advertising is evil. it's people trying to make you feel bad about yourself, to create voids in your life that only products can fill. What really gets me is that it seems like some of the great minds of our generation are involved in what's a fruitless activity, in terms of human advancement. Insurance agents and marketers keep better track of trends than research scientists, professors, and doctors. There's the real triumph of the free market. Can you hear me now?
PS You should all go out and buy the new Broken Social Scene album.
1 comment:
Right. With BzzAgent's first product (as you pointed out already in an email) "The Frog King" by Adam Davies, they not only had their, you know, worker bees out buzzing about it in "casual" conversation, but they were also reading the book while riding around on public transit, looking really interested, with the cover prominently visible (the cover was bright green, so it was hard to miss for starters), and their first big publicity bang was forgetting copies of it on the seats of ferries and trains that transport their target-audience probable hip consumers. Not a bad idea, I say. There are worse innovations in the world of consumerism right now than product gossip. Though I see the hint of creepy.
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