The Stealth Sell

Last weekend, The Sunday Times Style magazine ran this feature The Stealth Sell (let me know if the link has gone and I'll post the text). Overall, it's an interesting read that succinctly taps into some key live issues in Word of Mouth marketing. It's also fascinating to see that it was in a lifestyle section, not business or news.

What it does by the end of the piece however, is to lump together some forms of marketing that really aren't in the same ball-park.

The bit that I think it gets right, is to point out the deception that's going on by those people who want to exploit the power of word of mouth, rather than work with it. The author sites PayPerPost, who are paying bloggers up to £10 per post to endorse set products.

“This is a new way of looking at advertising,” says Tim Draper, a PayPerPost stakeholder. “You put an ad inside the text, and it’s more subtle.”

It's not more 'subtle' Tim, it's more 'deceitful'.

Whether you think paid posts are wrong or right (is deceiving someone the same as lying? Semantics - they're both wrong) it doesn't make good business sense for anyone involved, apart from Tim and PayPerPost:

• If the blogger is a serious writer who wants people to heed their opinion and come back to their blog (even for commercial reasons), then these paid posts will slowly but surely kill their legitimacy (their brand), and with that their audience. Who wants to read stealth ads masquerading as blogs in their spare time? Perhaps because blogging is online - you can't look these people in the eye to see if they're lying, and there's no editorial control - people who read blogs are ultra sensitive to sniffing out flogs (fake blogs).
• For the company ultimately paying for the post, this is also bad for their brand - unless you want to be known by your customers as the brand who has to pay people to lie about it, presumably because it's not that good, or because you're just the sort of big, evil corporation who likes doing this sort of thing

Where the article goes off track a little is the way it ends off, introducing the shady new art of "tryvertising", actually known for a hundred, if not thousands of, years as "sampling":

“Several years ago, a well-known trainer company went into working-class areas in America and doled out free shoes to a handful of ‘opinion-former’ kids aged between 14 and 18,” says Mark Ratcliff of the research consultancy Murmur. “Then they sat back and waited for demand to flare up. They told me where they appropriated that idea from,” he continues. “Crack dealers.”

A nice little anecdote, but what separates this "new tactic" from paid posts, and to my mind takes it out of the 'Stealth' category, is that no-one is being deceived. Some selected kids got some new free trainers; they could then make up their own minds whether they wanted to recommend them, or even wear them in the first place.

Lessons for pharma

1. If you're thinking about online strategies - don't pay for posts or flog. It'll not only demean your brand, but I'm sure the regulators would rightly take a pretty dim view of deceiving customers and consumers
2. Transpose this to what we do with customers and opinion leaders. Stop looking for ways to make them spout a promotional message, and start thinking of how you can create a situation where the right people in the right context can make up their own minds about your brand. Much more powerful and a win for everyone.