DummySpit

Some examples of corporate behaviour are a joy to bloggers. The latest example is the famed advertising and marcoms group Saatchi & Saatchi’s creation of a girl band called ‘Honeyshot’. As reported in The Guardian (UK) recently, it had the explicit role of “a vessel for covertly advertising products to music fans”.

At the beginning of April, Honeyshot’s first single ‘Style, Attract, Shock’ was sent out to DJs but without notifying them that it had been created by a subsidiary of the ad agency and that its title was the new slogan for a hair gel called Shockwave.

It was quickly rumbled by the BBC, whose Radio 1 is the top audience pop and rock music station in the UK, and banned from playlists. But not without being played. This may have been an outcome that got coverage for the brand, which has been mentioned for reasons of explaining the story in the previous paragraph. And probably someone has already told the brand’s owner that this furore was worth some absurd figure in advertising value equivalent.

Peter Robinson, who broke the story, makes two cogent points – “From Saatchi & Saatchi’s point of view, it (the record) betrays a stunning level of deception – which is going some, in the ad industry” and “… it is important that the Honeyshot project fails, which it has, unless the whole thing was a double bluff aimed solely at securing Shockwave’s column inches to promote the company’s penchant for insulting their customers’ intelligence.”

Will brands, their owners and advisers ever learn that honesty and authenticity are integral to their reputation?

Following on from my post on SimplyCity, it is notable that the latest edition of The Economist reports on buzz marketing which is the close cousin of WOM sites like SimplyCity. In the article “Building buzz” (p.76 of the UK edition), it points to the problems of control and ethics that are implicit in buzz marketing. “The difficulty for marketers is creating the right kind of buzz and learning to control it. Negative views spread just as quickly as positive ones, so if a product has flaws people will soon find out”.

The example of Microsoft sending laptops loaded with Vista to key bloggers was an example of misjudgement that boomeranged on the software company. They (and the blogging community) responded negatively to what could have been seen as a bribe or at least an unduly large gift. But there was no doubt as to which company had sent the laptop and software to the bloggers, whereas buzz marketing in some forms uses so-called “volunteers”, recruited with offers of free product or a loyalty rewards programme, to promote a product or service to friends and relatives.

In this case there may be no disclosure of interest by the “volunteer” who is speaking about product. That is a practised deception and so is, in my view, unethical. It’s bad enough to be ambushed by people selling pyramid schemes like Amway or inviting you to product evenings, but at least you know what their interest is within a few moments. For someone to be either promoting a product (whisper marketing) or getting feedback for product development (buzz marketing) without telling you of their interest is dangerous for the reputation of organisation using this strategy and potentially deceptive.  We all have heard recommendations from friends about products, but you expect them to be based on their genuine experience and not a set of messages that have been sent to them in exchange for reward.

Already, many PR professional bodies have set out policies on ethical communication and I hope that these will be operationalised in public relations and the other below-the-line disciplines. If not, who can we trust?