Marketing is the corporate function everyone loves to hate. Companies and consumers agree that there is too much of it; that too much money is spent on product promotion with too little accountability for return on investment. Yet, marketing matters. So, companies continue to spend billions to woo and keep buyers, and potential buyers continue to find ways to avoid being marketed to.
To remain viable, marketing has gone underground. The practice is called by various names—marketing by masquerade, stealth marketing or undercover marketing.
Product placement, or branded entertainment as it’s called in the industry, was considered undercover marketing until the practice became so widespread viewers started looking for the products and, later, stopped noticing them altogether.
Practitioners of undercover marketing insist it’s the only way to cut through the clutter and grab the attention of potential customers. Critics charge that dressing marketing up as something else entirely is at best disingenuous, at worst subversive. They are particularly distressed that more and more companies sell to children in ways too subtle for children to discern that they are being marketed to.
Nonetheless, the practice will continue, albeit, eventually, with legislative sanctions against covert marketing to children, preteen and younger. It will continue because more people are spending less time watching television and more time online, on their cell phones, at the movies, concerts, sporting and other organized large-audience events, or playing video games. As a result, marketing dollars will continue to be diverted from mainstream broadcast media to the Web, direct mail, and guerilla marketing, which involves persuading ordinary people with promises of trinkets, tickets, t-shirts, and other trade-offs, to extol the virtues of a product or service without admitting to a relationship with the marketer.
Broadcast media will still be part of the marketing mix. But Web advertising will receive an ever-larger share of companies’ marketing budgets. Web advertising offers companies a much bigger bang for their buck.
Stealth or undercover marketing is easier to accomplish online, but it won’t be producers of banner, pop-up, pop-under, or other in-your-face advertisements that get a piece of the action. In the future, Web advertising is more likely to take the form of specialty Web sites that are “intended to entrance visitors with humor, video or games,” writes The New York Times. For example, Burger King’s online promotion for its new TenderCrisp chicken sandwich barely mentions the company or the product. Visitors to SubservientChicken.com can type orders to a person in a chicken costume who is observed via Web cam obeying the visitors’ commands. A discreet link to Burger King’s Web site is the only corporate connection. Kraft Foods swore off advertising high-fat foods to young children on television, but it continues to market them to kids online. NabiscoWorld.com features an Oreo cookie-dunking game in which tiny cookies fall out of the sky while players try to catch them in a glass of milk. It may be entertainment, but it’s still marketing, and most young children don’t know they’re being marketed to, which concerns child advocates.
Such online “advergames” are increasingly popular among all age groups, and so far, government regulators have taken a hands-off approach to Internet advertising. More covert than advergames is the practice of “mainlining” products, which involves identifying people who influence others and giving them a product a company wants to push. These trendsetters wear, watch, read or consume the product and rave about it to anyone who will listen. “If the right person is wearing the right thing, people want it,” says Kelly Cutrone, founder of the fashion branding firm People’s Revolution.
Apparently, if the right people are using the right computer, listening to the right music, or playing the right video game other people will buy it, too.
Understandably, marketers are thrilled to uncover new methods to ensure their messages are heard above the din. But consumer advocates claim that stealth marketing is deceptive.
But it works, so it’s not likely to go away, and savvy marketers who find ways to be less subversive and more entertaining will be successful in reaching their target audiences.
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