The USA TODAY last week ran an article questioning the legality of buzz marketing, a widespread practice used by marketers to enlist youth in advertising campaigns. Proctor & Gamble's 4 year-old Tremor program, the major program mentioned in the article, sports close to 250,000 dedicated 13 to 19 year olds, (approximately 2/3 of whom are female) who get free P&G products in the mail to chat up to their friends at school, on the playground, or in church.
The problem, however, is not limited to the youth demographic. A similar peer-to-peer marketing style has been adopted by a Boston firm called BzzAgent, which places 60,000 volunteer marketers of all ages on the streets and in the homes of friends for a wide variety of products, each volunteer performing one-on-one promotions for the books, frozen dinners, or cosmetics BzzAgent represents. And recent campaigns by Lucasfilm, Ltd. (to promote Star Wars III), Tylenol (particularly in their artist-heavy Ouch! campaign), and Nike (in several campaigns, including one from the Converse division and another from Nike Skateboarding)—projects headed by marketing mavens at Faith Popcorn's BrainReserve and Weiden and Kennedy—use similar techniques. Cynics may call it Product Placement X-treme, but marketing strategists, and psychologists, just know it works.
This practice has arisen at a time when many have begun noting something of a “spiritual frustration” with our ad-heavy society. Unfortunately, this frustration only seems to manifest when people are confronted with traditional, identifiable advertising campaigns. It certainly doesn’t seem to effect those individuals who do marketing work for Tremor or BzzAgent, and it clearly didn’t impede the buzz marketers who worked for Lucasfilm, Ltd., Tylenol, or Nike.
Even more unfortunately, this spiritual frustration with traditional advertising means that peer-to-peer marketing is here to stay. Guerilla techniques and underground marketing campaigns will continue, and they will become smarter and more difficult to discern from organically created cultural products, from regular old schoolyard chit-chat or from conversations we fall into naturally with our friends over dinner.
"This is a practice that may be illegal," Jonah Bloom, executive editor of ADVERTISING AGE, told USA TODAY. "It's probably only a matter of time before someone jumps on it" to stop it, he adds.
Yet because these campaigns work—it's an estimated $100 to $150 million industry, although these numbers are rough due to the secrecy of these projects—they're going to be hard to eliminate.
And why they work is an interesting matter. Tremor and BzzAgent, for example, seem to work because participants never question the integrity of their contributions to the general awareness of product availability, according to a NEW YORK TIMES story by Rob Walker (December 5, 2004). Few tell friends they work in the marketing business, as they find it limits their credibility among peers. Marketing team members, who work on a volunteer basis in exchange for free gifts most never pick up, do not feel they are forwarding a hidden agenda. That they themselves retain a hidden agenda does not seem to bother them. After all, they know better than anyone else that they are not a part of the corporate advertising machine. Yet Tremor youth and BzzAgents—as well as BrainReservists, Weiden and Kennedy representatives, the Star Wars Episode III promotional participants, Ouch! campaign contributors, and the Nike marketing team members—are justifying themselves right out of the acknowledgment that they are, in fact, the most vital cog in the corporate advertising machine. They are the part that works, often freely and easily.
It is time for these campaigns to be stopped. They force youth and adults to ignore the values of honesty and integrity. While we wait for these practices to be criminalized, we may wish to begin a street-level campaign to generally acknowledge such buzz marketing as advertising. An essential part of that campaign must be to fully admit to our participation in them. And—as in a traditional boycott—refuse to support the products such campaigns shill.
