I have posted an indepth view on YawpCo.com

Though I see the trickery involved, here I’m still on the fence as to whether or not this is fundementally different to the general practices of marketing.

In particular, I would love to hear you opinion about Bzzagent.com and other such players – do you think they cross the ethical line?

Great blog – your success is inspiring as it is clearly the result of sincere, hard work and a total committment.

Adrian

Infomercials and their marketing tactics as well as paid search and any other form of paid advertisement are designed to do what most of these pretenders will never do… SELL PRODUCT!!! Unfortunately, the same tactics that work for the good guy work for the crooks. As in the past, so is true today…BUYER BEWARE! Do your homework and buy smartly, but don’t knock creative means to market product. These whiners can cry and complain all they want, but several hundred billion dollars later, effective infomercial marketers are still laughing ALL THE WAY TO THE BANK. Meanwhile in most cases many wanna be marketers are taking out small business loans in the hopes of selling product with outdated marketing methods and tired strategy and failing all day long! What rules? Remember…the one with the GOLD Makes the RULES!

I have taken Good honest clients with incredible products from almost nothing to hundreds of millions of dollars in sales with just these types of tactics…What’s wrong with that? Unless you are adverse to honest success I can’t see why there is any crying going on at all!

There are numerous techniques – legal and ethical – that companies/marketers use to get products ‘front and center’, whether it’s traditional advertising, product placement (what you mention, and it’s huge in grocery stores, where companies pay to have their line of cereal at eye level).

The key word I think in this whole debate is ‘deception’. There are systems and regulations in place – think the FCC and other government regulators – to protect the public from fraud and deception. Some stores will use ‘bait and switch’ tactics, which are illegal, where they advertise an insanely low price for a product, and then you find the product is not in the store, but an alternative product – at a higher price – is offered instead. This is illegal.

I think the closest comparison I can come up with (to compare to the fake commenters in the video story), is when you see a product advertised, in print or on the web for instance, and there are several glowing ‘testimonials’ from real people about the product. If the company made those testimonials up, and the public and authorities found out, do you not think this would raise a cloud over the company? And I’m sure fines would be levied.

The video marketing techniques we’ve been discussing may not fall into the same legal area as these I’m mentioning, but they leave the same nasty taste in many mouths. Whenever deception is used, it runs the risk of alienating consumers, and devaluing/damaging the whole concept of UGC (user generated content). The Web, for all of its creative glory, is getting overrun by tech savvy opportunists with little or no ethics, who will stop at nothing to game the system.

Well written response. We know when something doesn’t ‘feel right’, and this guy’s methods come no where close to passing the sniff test. I’d lump his methodology and snickering justifications into those used and given by others who deploy trickery to ‘get the message out’. Take the endless stacks of ridiculous solicitations in the mail, especially those with IMPORTANT FINANCIAL DOCUMENT INSIDE on the envelope, or a fake check in the envelope window, or the ones that mimic a federal document, so you open it, then trash it immediately. It was viewed, right? Did it make a sale? No. I’ve never, and will never, do business with anyone who uses misleading means to market, advertise and do business in general.

Marketers fool themselves into thinking “if I can just get past the noise, and get someone to read/view the message”, and then use any and all means to do that. They are clueless, or are they? Once a consumer senses trickery, the game is over, and a NO SALE sign pops up. Numbers mean nothing. Integrity, compelling content, compelling products, great service are part of the long term strategy. And you can sleep at night, knowing your little scam kingdom will not fall down one day when the curtain’s pulled. In this case, the guy pulled the curtain himself. The comparison to an infomercial salesman is perfect. He feels he has now risen to the level of marketing ’sage’.