DM Weekly - mad.co.uk, 31 October 2005

DMC discusses the ethics of viral, buzz and word of mouth marketing.

Justin Kirby discusses the ethics of viral, buzz and word of mouth marketing.

A recent letter from Ralph Nader-sponsored consumer group Commercial Alert to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has re-ignited the debate in the US regarding ethics in buzz marketing. The letter urges the FTC to investigate whether buzz marketing is legal or not. There are two main issues raised:

1) Deception vs disclosure i.e. whether people enlisted to promote products make their motivation clear or not.

2 ) Targeting minors.

The letter cites Procter & Gamble’s Tremor initiative which has recruited over 250,000 teens as an influencer network for buzz marketing. “The Commission should carefully examine the targeting of minors by buzz marketing, because children and teenagers tend to be more impressionable and easy to deceive.”

The first problem with Commercial Alert’s letter is its vague and incomplete description of buzz marketing. There is a big difference between the recruitment of agents who are incentivised to spread commercial messages (which is the main thrust of the letter’s complaint), and PR stunts that are designed to get on the conversational agendas of consumers and the media i.e. to create ‘buzz’ - just one example from a plethora of other buzz marketing approaches. There’s nothing wrong with condemning unethical business practices, but it’s plain ignorant to label one approach ‘buzz marketing’ as if it represented the entire field and thereby tar every buzz marketing technique with the same brush.

Notwithstanding, the US debate needs to discuss the ‘incentivised consumer agent’ area of buzz marketing much more thoroughly before drawing conclusions about its legality. Firstly, if people are being incentivised to promote products, disclosing that fact as a pre-requisite would seem to be a no-brainer for ethical organisations. Disclosure may even discourage the practice of incentivising agents, because it tends to reduce the credibility of any product endorsement. Secondly, the incentivisation itself needs to be discussed in greater depth. Is it financial or some other kind of reward, and how is it earned? Making these distinctions would help avoid outlawing not only deceptive practices, but also positive activities that actually empower consumers - for example when buzz is created by companies that have acted on feedback through market research, product sampling, etc.

As it stands, Commercial Alert is in danger of prompting another knee-jerk piece of US legislation like the CAN-SPAM Act which has driven the worst spamming exponents underground while penalising many ethical email marketers.

It will be interesting to see whether the UK’s Advertising Standards Association (ASA) now tries to extend its remit to cover buzz marketing as part of its non-broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) code. The code doesn’t currently apply to live oral communications. However, the ASA is currently investigating if (and how) viral marketing could become part of the code.

For now, the code covers only paid-for ad space on the web. So it’s difficult to see how it could be used to regulate a range of viral marketing techniques that operate via peer-to-peer spread - i.e. material is passed on voluntarily by online users and it generally bypasses media owners altogether as far as paid-for space goes. (Cynics and conspiracy theorists may conclude that this is the real reason why regulating viral marketing is being looked into…). Even if the ASA somehow extends its remit to cover unpaid-for space on the web, how on earth would it police any viral marketing-related regulations it puts into place, not to mention all the other editorial content that would then be subject to scrutiny?

This problem was exemplified by the ASA’s rejection of a complaint against Powerleague who released a viral video clip of a kick about with a hamster as the ball. The complainant had not received the clip direct from the advertiser but had been forwarded it from a friend.

The ASA’s problems regulating user-driven marketing approaches such as viral marketing mirror the problems that the FTC will have in the US trying to regulate and enforce buzz marketing. How do you police what people say to their friends

Rather than just see how they can try and shoehorn regulating these new fields into their existing remits, they should first have a more in-depth look at how these techniques actually work. This will mean consulting specialist viral, buzz and word of mouth practitioners, rather than simply liaising with members of the existing paid-for media advertising chain, be it media owners, media buyers, ad agencies or advertisers.

A very different set of factors needs to be considered when it comes to viral, buzz and word of mouth marketing, not least because in these fields people are the media – they decide what they will say, what they will pass on and to whom. Legislation that has been developed to control paid-for media and marketing will be largely irrelevant.

Justin Kirby is managing director of Digital Media Communications and Co-editor and -author of Connected Marketing: The Viral, Buzz and Word of Mouth Revolution