nah pop, no style

I kind of hate being known as someone who’s preoccupied with hating Myspace, which I’m not, I just don’t really like it for a number of reasons, and have enumerated them at points in the past. Whatever. So, with that out of the way, I point you to an interesting NY Times article about stealth(-ish) marketing on Myspace: Digital Kids: Myspace blurs line between friends and flacks. (You need a login on the Times website to read it, but it’s free, so if you don’t have one already, just suck it up and get one. You only need to pay if you want an upgraded subscription, to read columnists and do recent crosswords and stuff.)

In the defense of Myspace, social networking sites aren’t the only place that stealth marketing is going on; if you’re attached to a college campus at all, you see it all around you. “Real-life” (is there a better term for this) guerrilla marketing is, I’d say, even more unsettling than internet stealth marketing, because there’s more of a natural tendency to be suspicious of who’s on the other side of an interent-mediated communication (since there’s no face-to-face, nor even any voice-to-voice, through the computer).

When companies hire cool kids to provide word-of-mouth advertising, it creates a situation in which word-of-mouth — which you might consider the last “genuine” form of interaction — can’t be trusted anymore; you never know whether the person you’re talking to, who you might even know well, is speaking from experience or from a script that s/he may or may not actually believe. In essence, in stealth marketing, the message being communicated is being sent by the advertiser to the receiver through the medium of a person who the receiver is expected to respect. How do you feel about being a medium, cool kids?