Black Ops Advertising. Mara Einstein

us to click on content is only part of the equation. Once we read the “article” or watch the video, the hope is that we’ll share it, causing the content to go viral: spreading from one consumer to another because of its entertainment value. Viral marketing is essential because it uses our social networks to sell products. We promote the brand, we tell our friends and family to watch the video or buy a product or “Like” a page, and because the endorsement is from a known and trusted commodity, our friends and family are more inclined to pay attention. This is word-of-mouth marketing (WOM), and it is the backbone of the new digital stealth marketing ecosystem. Marketers love word-of-mouth marketing because it is, and always has been, the most effective form of sales. Further: if the goal is to obscure the advertising message, word-of-mouth marketing is also the least suspect. After all, if a friend tells us they liked the latest Jurassic Park movie, there’s no reason for us not to believe it. Unfortunately, what we also come to believe is that amassing friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter is ultimately about sharing with our compatriots. It is not: it is about creating an audience for advertisers. Our relationships, then, become means of facilitating market transactions, or in the parlance of the market: they have been monetized.¹²

      Further complicating the distinctions between what is “real” and what is a marketing ploy is that we have taken on the tools of the marketer. We tweet, we post, we even add the corporate name. One example of this is #alexfromtarget. In November 2014, a teenage girl went into her local Target store and saw a cute guy bagging items at the cash register. She took a picture of Alex (his name was on his work badge), posted it on Twitter, and created the hashtag #alexfromtarget. Teens started retweeting his picture, and in twenty-four hours, Alex had more than 300,000 followers and was all over the news. This was not a PR stunt—it was an everyday teen acting as a marketer for the discount store. In another example, eight-year-old Evan, star of EvanTube, creates videos to review toys and videogames in a family-friendly format. This pint-sized pitchman rakes in over a million dollars a year and has more views than Katy Perry.¹³ So are Evan and his YouTube channel advertisements for the products reviewed, ads for Evan personally, or legitimate consumer reviews? Hard to tell.

      By now, you might wonder: was the article I read this morning paid for by Apple? Was that BuzzFeed quiz a promotion? Is that post on Facebook “organic,” or did a marketer pay for me to see it? The newspaper article, maybe; BuzzFeed, almost definitely; and with Facebook, any content is increasingly likely to be advertising because the company continuously manipulates its algorithm to improve profitability by forcing marketers to pay for content. Most people have begun to suspect this, at least in the case of Facebook. We have also gotten savvier about how marketers use data to promote products to us. We know that at least a portion of online reviews are fake or paid for,¹⁴ and Millennials, in particular, are not all that sensitive about giving up personal data for convenience if it means that they can get a discount or find out about the latest trend, lest they face the dreaded FOMO (fear of missing out).¹⁵

      But what if you don’t know that a blog post has a marketer behind it, or that the celebrity tweeting about a lip balm was paid $20,000 for those 140 characters, or that a newspaper article was sponsored by an online streaming video service, or that a documentary you watched on National Geographic was paid for by an oil company? If you knew it was advertising, chances are you’d speed by it the same way you zap past a commercial on your DVR or dump your junk mail in the recycle bin. Or if you did watch it, aware of the content’s sponsorship, you might approach it with a more critical or cynical eye—something companies do not want you to do.

      The line between unbiased content and commercials has gotten so blurred that even the language around these concepts has changed. Advertisers no longer think of themselves as producing commercials; they produce “films.” Marketing departments are increasingly staffed by former journalists who labor not in a “bullpen,” but in what are offensively called “newsrooms.” Few of the former journalists I spoke with have an issue with creating this biased work because they claim that they wouldn’t produce a piece that would offend a consumer. Unfortunately, that right there is part of the problem.

       SOCIAL MEDIA: “FRIEND” AND FOE

      Content confusion is exacerbated by social media, where native ads fit most indigenously into the noncorporate content. But creating engaging content is not enough. Marketers also need to create a relationship with us—they want to be our friend—so that we will feel indebted to them or inspired to share our information and experiences with others. This might be as simple as our posting the promotional video for the upcoming season of Orange Is the New Black, “Liking” a charity, or tweeting about the great service we got at our last stay at a Hilton.

      To build these relationships, the company must get our attention. This is done through social media (and facilitated by data), which enables direct interaction between companies and consumers. Advertisers call this customer relationship marketing, or CRM. This relationship is important because the more time we spend with the product, the more likely we are to become a customer or a repeat customer. Having one-to-one connections with consumers is very new for marketers. Relationships, in contrast to yelling at someone to buy via a commercial, take time to build, and digital technologies allow for types of company-consumer interactions that traditional media technologies didn’t. “Social is not for selling, it’s for social,” is the battle cry I heard over and over at the marketing events I attended. It frankly felt creepy, and if not creepy, sad.

      Many of us buy into the attention from marketers because being seen online ties into our sense of self. “Like” something on Facebook, and it shows others who we are. Better still, if someone from the brand company we’ve “Liked” interacts with us via social media, we feel acknowledged, even appreciated. In one amusing example of social engagement, Groupon made a Facebook post about a product called the banana bunker, which protects the phallic-shaped fruit. Not surprisingly, people posted numerous sex jokes: “What do you do if your banana curves the other way?” and “Do they come with bananacidal lube?” In response, Groupon engaged in witty repartee: “Good News—the Bunker is Omni-directional!” and “Why would you commit bananacide?! Monster!”¹⁶ Consumers were enthralled (12,000 comments, 18,000 Likes, and 43,000 shares), the event got press coverage, and the banana bunker sold out in less than two hours. In a more G-rated version of the same idea, the fast food restaurant Sonic ran a campaign called “Back-to-School Summaries” where they asked students to submit book titles from their summer reading list. The company then responded with a synopsis in ten words or less. These included Hamlet: “Wants revenge for his father’s death, goes a little overboard”; A Clockwork Orange: “Futuristic totalitarian society. Violence, violence, violence,” and finally, Fifty Shades of Grey: “Nice try. There’s no way you’re reading that for school.” These examples are fun and fairly harmless, like watching a comedian, only in an asynchronous format.

      Other sorts of relationship building via digital technologies, however, allow for extremely individualized interactions that are exceedingly invasive and border on stalking. For instance, Laura Spica—an average American dog owner—tweeted a picture of her dog looking out the window for squirrels. Purina tweeted back the dog’s picture but with a twist: they had outfitted the dog by drawing in a hat, sunglasses, and a jacket. Purina had also drawn a badge in the upper left hand corner of the picture saying “Squirrel Patrol,” and underneath the dog they had written, “starring HENRY the dog.” The dog owner was so enthralled by the attention that she tweeted back:

      @Purina Oh-Em-Gee! You pimped my #PurinaDog! That’s possibly the cutest thing I’ve ever seen!!! #SquirrelPatrol #HenryDog¹⁷

      In under a minute, the company had reached out to someone and moved her from talking about her dog to promoting Purina. Just like #alexattarget, Laura didn’t have to attach a brand name to her post, but she did, and Purina loved her for it.

      Purina is able to engage with Laura and other consumers like her because they scan the Internet in real time looking for mentions of cats and dogs—an activity known as social listening—and determine how they can insert themselves into the conversation. Did Laura buy Purina? I don’t know. But she did become a brand ambassador in response to some brief corporate