Is it just me or is this kind of scary?

First there was pay for placement, now there's pay for buzz. According to AdAge, word of mouth is becoming a saleable medium, just like television. Apparently ad agencies will be able to "buy good buzz" the same way you can buy and ad, or a congressman. I guess with enough money you can buy anything, but to me, the beauty of word of mouth was that it was based on reputation and reality, not how much money someone was paying for the service.

What's got me really scared is that the advertising community it all over this, and PR, that first invented word of mouth, is nowhere to be found.

According to Ad Age: "Turning WOM into a medium -- as opposed to just a marketing discipline or tactic -- could do wonders for its stature, allowing agencies to buy buzz alongside traditional media buys. There’s even a rate card forthcoming this week. ....BzzAgent campaigns work like this: Volunteer agents choose a campaign to work on and receive information about the product. After forming an opinion, the agents spread it to people they know and then produce a report on the activity. The reports are then analyzed for the client. Agents receive points in exchange for reports that they can redeem for rewards."

To me it all ads up to more fakery and less "truthiness" in marketing. I for one, will begin to suspect anyone's opinion, and personally would want to know how much they are getting paid to promote it. Kind of how I feel about Congress these days.

Comments

[Sean Moffitt aka The Buzz Canuck]

Katie, one of my PR colleagues mentioned you had tapped into the article written about word of mouth as a saleable medium in Ad Age.

I think it's a great question you bring up.
I'll mention upfront that I'm the Canadian partner to BzzAgent. Obviously based on that affiliation, I put a lot of stock in their concept and their way of doing business.

I'll take two tacts to further the discussion here - the first, 1 in 7 of all conversations are focused on word of mouth, all we do is put in front of a group of interested consumers something that could inspire them (we do turn away quite a bit of business that misses our standard)and if they so choose, consider it worthy of talking about with their friends (which they naturally do anyways). Trust is the grease that allows word of mouth to work here - evangelists become pretty lonely if all they do is shill bad stuff.

The second one is a comparison to advertising - so if good word of mouth cultivates a relationship with consumers and provides the facts, stories, situations and triggers that makes a product or service interesting in an in-depth, honest, conversational manner. Advertising, given the gaping hole in consumer trust, attention and time oftentimes needs to scream from the rooftops, be overly promotional and extend and in fact stretch the benefit expectation (do I really believe I will get the girl, if I drive a Pontiac G6?). For my mind, I'd much rather receive my marketing in the first manner.

I've had a chance to go through some of your posts and I like the range of topics you cover, I just wouldn't be worried about a future that returns to the way marketing used to be done - from Marathon to the Disciples to the early explorers to the town criers and the first modern-day marketers...word of mouth is the most credible and effective medium we always have had and is just now in vogue again.

Drop a line at my blog if you care: http://buzzcanuck.typepad.com/agentwildfire/

[David Phillips]

As long as PR is associated with Painting-by-Numbers (opps... sorry ... Marketing), thinks of Aves are cool and telesales opperations to 'sell-in' stories is good practice then we have to suffer fools gladly.

The (so called ) PR practitioners who do so are second class citizens anyway so don't worry about them. Just send in contributions to the relief fund.

Lets concentrate on the real world and let advertising kill itself off. It needs no help from us.