Viral marketing: the antidote

Miss Me tells the story of yet another viral marketing scam. Ditzy gals in a bar dupe gulible guys into beliving the latest bottled water product leaves them feeling "so great, so real". Ah that would be "so real" as opposed to "surreal" I guess.

Most of us have heard about it by now, that inciduous consumer brain washing scam called "Viral Marketing". One of the proponents of viral marketing is Big Fat Worldwide Inc. who say "we infuse brands into the target's life without disrupting their everyday, normal behavior." The logical conclusion of viral marketing is that no one will express any opinion about a product without expecting to get paid for it, and everyone will express any opinion if paid for it. There will be no independent trusted third party information to be had on products, only paid for viralmercials. Most web sites that allow free input of consumer product opinions have experienced this problem. Sooner or later a site gets large enough that paid shills start posting bogus AAA+++ reviews, genuine reviews start migrating to the next web site and before the credibility of the entire site is drained to zero.

So what is the antidote? Viral anti-marketing. The target host will recognize the attacking viral agent and produce antibodies. The antibodies will "identify viral agents, expose them, surround them and disable their viral messaging mechanisms rendering them harmless". The antibodies are of course us, that is those of us that have woken up to the reality of walking, talking billboards penetrating our social environment. We willl be trained in the art of viral marketing agent recognition and go about our business of routing out the phoney consumers. At such time we will summons any adjacent antibodies and start loud conversations about how much the product sucks, or how many pounds they gained from drinking said sugared beverage, or what a big rip-off paying $3 a bottle for flavoured water is when a $12 purifier will give you a 1000 gallons of tasty beverage straight from the tap.

However I suspect that deep in the bowels of consumer exploitation land, sick and twisted minds have already dreamed up paid-for viral anti-marketing. Companies are, as I write, no doubt sending out paid viral anti-marketing agents to attempt to counter attack the viral messages from their competitors. Its only a matter of time before the first viral marketing vs. viral anti-marketing agent fight breaks out. So the next time you hear two loud-talking beautiful people asserting how their water has left them feeling "so great, so real", get ready to duck because the sugared soda water company agents may just be lurking in the corner ready for the kill.