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| Mooninite Thursday, February 1, 2007Marketing gone awryBoth John and I felt the Mooninite ad campaign/carefully coordinated attack brought to mind a Drake Bennett Ideas article of last year about inventive and borderline offensive guerrilla marketing tactics. One relatively benign example around the time of the piece was that of lonelygirl15, who captivated audiences of 40,000 a day with her Web cam confessions on YouTube but turned out to be an actress hired by a film production company. Perhaps more insidious and meaner was the stunt Drake discussed involving pretty girls who seemed to be flirting with passersby but were in fact selling cell-phone cameras and the like: "Isn't my Samsung DSC-412 fantastic??" I could do a lot of hand-wringing here about the breakdown of social trust brought on by advertising's bending of truth and intimacy, and I believe that's real, as David Foster Wallace once pointed out in an essay mostly about television. But I just want to point out an interesting study Drake uncovered: Walter Carl, a communications professor at Northeastern University, earlier this year published a study that looked at word-of-mouth advertising campaigns for a variety of products. In some of the interactions the people talking up a product (the agent) admitted that they were part of a coordinated advertising campaign, in others they didn't. What Carl found is that whether the person being talked up knew of the agent's ties or not made no difference in their overall impression of the product. In fact, finding out about those ties slightly increased the "pass-along rate" (the probability that the targeted person would in turn tell someone else about the product). As Carl suggested, maybe we like to be targeted. The Boston Police sure don't. Brainiac's coverage of the Mooninite attack: Mooninite aftermath | Attack of the Mooninites! | Eat your heart out P.T. Barnum | Son of Mooninite! | Panic in the Hub Keep checking back for more. [Updated 1:20 p.m.] Posted by Evan Hughes at 12:51 PM
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