Undercover marketing

Undercover Marketing
By Paul A. Herbig

Advertising has become advertising ad nauseum, and we are forever being pitched to, marketed to, and appealed to by someone trying to sell us something. If you find that troubling, the companies trying to sell you stuff aren't too thrilled either. They're finding it harder and harder in this assault of advertising to get your attention, and are coming up with inventive - even devious - ways of grabbing you. This is called "undercover marketing" -- marketing by masquerade, or stealth marketing. Somewhere in downtown New York, a secret plan is being hatched. A handpicked team of attractive, approachable guns-for-hire has been tapped to go undercover. They've been assembled by a company called Essential Reality, which has launched a new product called the "P-5 Glove," a cutting-edge device that video-gamers can use to fly planes and fire weapons on their computers, with the twitch of a finger.

“We're gonna go into coffee bars and crowded places,” says one marketer. “Your job is to go out there and have fun with it. And say, ‘Yeah sure, c'mon you wanna try it? Great, try it,’ and then all of the sudden you just involve them with the brand. And then feed them a few sound bites along the way: ‘Hey, you're in there. It's, like, look at this, it's like you're in the game. It's like you're in the game’ -- that's a good sound bite.”

Inside a nearby Starbucks, Theo and Kumani could be any of a million 20-somethings hanging out, obsessed with their new toy, not pitching anything, just waiting for someone to approach them. "How long have you had this," asks a curious bystander. " I've had it a few days. They had a whole lot, I got a lot of product information," says Theo. "It works really well. Try it on for a minute, you'll see this thing moves fluidly." "Okay, I'll try it," the man says, playing right into Theo’s hands. After the temptation, Theo offers to email him information about the product, making sure he never lets on that he’s on the job. No one is overtly trying to sell you anything, only trying to get you to want it, and then, of course, buy it and tell your friends about it. It’s not a soft sell or a hard sell. It’s a secret sell.

Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote about such things in his book, "The Tipping Point," thinks undercover marketing is a bit of a con game: “Well, there's an element, obviously, of deception involved that I don't think is the case in conventional advertising. Conventional advertising is about trying to charm us or trying to persuade us. But it's not usually about trying to trick us. And it's the trickery part I think, that makes this different.” But there is deception in all advertising. For example, the cars you see on television are slicker, faster, and shot in a particular way to make them look even better than they may look in a showroom. But there's a set of rules that govern a lot of advertising and we're aware of the rules,” says Gladwell. “We’re aware that the woman in the advertising for Ivory Soap is prettier than most women in our lives. A line is crossed, I think, when you go outside of those normal boundaries and start to deceive people in ways that they are, where they are totally unwitting to what's going on.”

"Cool new products" are the lifeblood of undercover marketing, and these are the kinds of people the marketers want to get them to not just buy, but get them talking about a product. But can buzz be manufactured?

“Part of what makes real word of mouth so powerful is the understanding we have from, that the person telling us about it is telling us about it for, for disinterested reasons,” says Gladwell. “They're not being paid by somebody. They have our interests at heart. That is worlds apart from a situation where the person telling us something is telling us that because they have some private agenda. They're getting paid, they're being planted.” “My problem with undercover marketing is not what happens in the moment. It's what happens a week, or two weeks, or a month down the road,” adds Gladwell. “When we discover we've been duped. And I think that the moment when we discover we've been duped causes a backlash. Companies who engage in this practice are courting that backlash. And that's a very, very dangerous thing to play with.”

The consumers in the examples above were unaware that they were being pitched to every time they were offered a drink. These painfully hip party animals do not seem a bit curious that the only alcohol being poured is a new brand called Turi Vodka -- nobody hyping anything, just pouring. David Elias, CEO of a marketing company called "Soulkool," ran the vodka operation. He's the man to go to if you want to influence the choices of that fickle, unpredictable 20-something demographic. He made a deal with the hottest club in town: to only push Turi Vodka at this party, hoping to start a vodka buzz..

“This is not the old theory. This is the new way of doing it. The clutter in the marketplace, people feeling like they're marketed to all the time, that kind of message for this demographic doesn't work,” says Elias. “It really, they're not interested. They want to know about it from a friend of theirs that's in the know, that keeps up with the trends. And that way it's very subtle.”

Subtle is Elias' weapon of choice. On the day 60 Minutes visited, Soulkool operatives were going undercover on the Internet, promoting the movie "Cowboy Bebop," an animated feature. Soulkool employees, all of them barely in their 20s, boost the promotion by flooding Internet chat rooms and message boards with rave reviews for the movie. Soulkool does not mention any professional affiliation, so the kids who read their messages have no idea they're talking to a paid marketer, hired to plug the movie. And it's not just Soulkool employees who are doing the plugging.

There's Lucas Schlager, a 13-year-old Cowboy Bebop fanatic, one of 350 volunteers across the country enlisted by Soulkool to hype the movie in exchange for T-shirts and posters. From the comfort of his Long Island bedroom, Lucas spends hours in chat rooms, typing and hyping away. “Thirteen different chats and four message boards, multiple postings. And I would just, you know, completely tell everything about this movie. And just get people to go see it,” says Schlager. Lucas sometimes mentions Soulkool in his chats, but often he doesn't. The other person has no idea he's dealing with a marketer. Undercover marketing hasn't eclipsed the old fashioned kind, but it's growing. And if you think you haven't run into an undercover marketer yet, well, that's the point.

Considerable risks do exist. If marketers fail to hide their vested interest in selling a product, they run condsiderable risk of backlash. Cases where consumers have found out they have been manipulated into liking the product, they generally become angry at the marketer (and by association that product) over being mislead. This indignation has lead some to apply more derogatory names to undercover marketing, such as roach baiting, likening the products marketed this way to poison. In some cases, the amount of buzz generated by a failed campaign can exceed that of a successful one, only with the opposite of the desired result.

When targeting consumers known to be consistent Internet users, undercover marketers have taken a significant interest in leveraging Internet chat rooms and forums. In these settings, people tend to perceive everyone as peers, the semi-anonymity reduces the risk of being found out, and one marketer can personally influence a large number of people. During the dot com boom at the turn of the century, stock promoters frequently used chat rooms to create a buzz and drive up the price of a stock.

Whatever the risks, undercover marketing only requires a small investment for a large potential pay off. It remains a cheap and effective way of generating buzz, especially in markets such as Tobacco and alcohol where media-savvy target consumers have become increasingly resistant or inaccessible to other forms of advertising.

Paul Herbig is the Managing Partner of Herbig Marketing Associates, (www.herbigandsons.com) a nationally renown marketing consulting company and former Professor Marketing and Dean, Ketner School of Business for Tri-State University. He can be contacted at mktgandme@aol.com.