Guerilla Marketing: Who Can We Trust?

In the March issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, a feature story dubbed "Spies Like Us" talks about the issues of "corporate shilling" worming into blogs and message boards.

The story mentions www.alliwantforxmasisapsp.com (fake) where a marketing company by the name of Zipatoni was hired by Sony to create a viral ad campaign promoting the PSP.

The floggers (fake blogger) left messages for readers in a forced slang and bad "1337" (Leet) speak.

It was this suspiciously forced street-slang that made readers question the blogs credibility and eventually a connection between the blog, Zipatoni and Sony together was found.

This caused readers/Sony fans to outrage in disgust with remarks such as, "This is retarded. As a gamer who is part of Sony's target audience I'm insulted not just by the integrity of this website, but that this reflects how intelligent Sony's marketing department thinks I am. Good job turning consumers off your product."

For the record: The article not only mentioned Sony doing this, but I want to leave as much as possible to the article. Now to my opinion.

The consumer is not stupid and to see how companies like MS and Sony try to manipulate them is as the quote above stated an insult to our intelligence.

We can assume these companies (and I include Nintendo) are just after money not consumer fan-based.

But why try to make a shoddy attempt to fool your customer, just to be bit in the ass by it.

It's safe to assume this espionage-type of advertising won't stop until companies know that they will lose more than gain from these acts.

My question to you: Is a company's credibility important to it selling a product?

-R

*PSP flog - http://www.ukresistance.co.uk/sonylieblog/default.aspx.htm
*Zipatoni - http://web.lexis-nexis.com.ucfproxy.fcla.edu/universe/document?_m=2076c27b04a38c3fd70ad61819115404&_docnum=2&wchp=dGLzVlz-zSkVA&_md5=e6e9d9b9b0b1b04557b3966470b57247
Wikipedia site (take with a grain of salt): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipatoni
*image - http://www.survivalguide.com/picts/espionage.jpg