There’s a scene in the original, 1960s version of Bedazzled in which Peter Cook (the devil) is complaining to Dudley Moore about what a slump he’s been in lately.
“Take the seven deadly sins,” he says. “I thought those up in one afternoon. The only thing I’ve come up with lately is advertising.”
How true!
Well, the devil seems to have been tweaking the concept of advertising lately to try to make it imitate the infectious properties of a virus.
The idea is to give you something neat bundled with advertising so that you’ll become “infected” and share the infection with your friends and loved ones, allowing the advertisers to exploit your personal social network and infect those you know and love.
Things like this have been going on throughout the history of advertising, and I don’t mind in principle advertisers providing you with something entertaining or valuable in exchange for the chance to pitch their product to you. Heck, that’s the principle on which commercial TV and radio work. So individual viral marketing tools may be fine in and of themselves.
What I am annoyed by is the dehumanizing attitude displayed by the ad executives who have framed “viral marketing” in this manner. Advertising frequently involves a dehumanizing manipulation of the masses, and consciously modelling your techniques off of viruses is an expression of this attitude.
LEARN ABOUT “VIRAL MARKETING.”
AND LEARN ABOUT ONE VIRAL MARKETING TOOL: “THE SUBSERVIENT CHICKEN.”
Oh yeah, ALSO LEARN ABOUT “ASTROTURFING.”
