Evil teen buzz marketing tries to go legit

When you run a dodgy marketing strategy, like getting teenagers to secretly sell to their friends, it’s best to band together and create an air of legitimacy. That’s what “buzz marketing” groups did recently with the first meeting of their new group: Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), as this article in Alternet reports.

Buzz marketing in teens is gaining popularity as big companies like Proctor and Gamble (via tremor.com), all scramble for a piece of the $170 billion teens will spend this year on cosmetics, clothes, DVDs, music and anything else that isn’t nailed down. By hiring influencial teens to covertly talk-up product to their friends, many say these marketing tactics take advantage of unsophisticated consumers, who often aren’t aware of that their friends are putting on the big sell:

“Some of the forms that [buzz marketing] takes have to do with recruiting kids to be marketers and encouraging them to keep their identities as marketers secret,” says David Walsh, president and founder of the National Institute on Media and the Family (NIMF) in Minneapolis. “So kids end up being junior ad people, and they’re encouraged not to share this [even] with their friends.”

Teens can also put themselves in danger by giving away too much information when the lines between marketing and community are blurred:

“NIMF points out that at one marketer-facilitated online community, kids can create their own Old Spice “Girls of the Red Zone” calendar. And that signing up for membership at Soul-Kool.com, one of a handful of buzz-marketing firms that double as online communities, requires entering an instant-messenger address.”

The party line is that WOMMA was formed to set down some guidelines to protect youth against tactics like this. But anyone who has ever hung up on a telemarketer will see that WOMMA is merely marketering types trying to legitmize a dubious practice before government catches on legislates some guidelines.

Putting marketers in charge of ethics is never a good idea. I look forward to watching the shocked indignation from WOMMA reps when the next inevitable teen buzz marketing scandal hits the news.

tagged: [consumerism] [buzz_marketing][evil][womma]

In your face and on your bookshelf

Although this book came out last year, I’ve been turning to, In Your Face: The Culture of Beauty and You a lot lately while researching my latest project and each time I flip it open, I feel I must tell everyone I know about it.

I was lucky enough to first hear about In Your Face at the 2004 Book Expo and wrote a quick review for Canadian Bookseller magazine:

From Annick Press comes In Your Face: The Culture of Beauty and You by Shari Graydon. Following up on her success with Made You Look, Graydon tackles the myths and false promises that lie at the heart of our culture obsessed with beauty. Graydon tells it like it is, revealing the truths about the double standards and constant competition we all engage in as we strive to be beautiful. In Your Face is easily the most important book for teens this year and should be read by everyone who looks in the mirror each morning.

This morning I discovered that Annick Press has built an In Your Face mini-site. Like the book, it is definitely worth checking out. The site highlights some of the darkest secrets that our culture holds as it pushes us all toward the one ideal of beauty:

Too Ethnic?

Some Asian people seek plastic surgery to make their eyes more “Western”. Around the world products like hair straighteners and skin whiteners have been flying off the shelves for decades. Why the craze to look Caucasian? Although people of colour make up 50 % of the population in many large North American cities, most mainstream magazines, movies and TV shows feature overwhelmingly white actors and models.

If you happen to know anyone, boy or girl, who is in their teens, then this book is simply an essential addition to your library. Buy it, drop it on the kitchen counter and let them discover it for themselves. I’ll bet you’ll see them flip it open, browse through quickly, ready to judge and then quietly take the book into their rooms. You’ll never see it again, but that’s a good thing. They’ll be reading it and gaining some very strong defences against the relentless beauty machine that is our modern culture.

tagged: [culture] [beauty] [consumerism] [books]

DIY Vlogger Teleprompter

History has shown that every new technology borrows from the old (the computer keyboard you type on is a throwback to the old typewriter and hasn’t changed much since.) So, it’s natural that vloggers will want to borrow from television to help shape the future of this new form of blogging. While this can lead some uninteresting and redundant uses of vlogging, it also leads to some cool innovations.

Like Max Rottersman’s Do-It-Yourself Video Blogger Plastiprompter. With a webcam, laptop and some old CD cases you can be reading your vlog posts with the style and grace of Peter Mansbridge.

I don’t know why it took a vlogger to invent this handy cheap teleprompter (it can be used for any video recording and not just over the web stuff) but I think it’s a testament to their inventiveness with technology. As for their content, they would do well to listen to this guy.

tagged: [vlogs] [TV] [blogs]

del.icio.usly tagged

In the last year, I’ve wondered at del.icio.us, played with del.icio.us and put my brain on del.icio.us. Now I am offically streaming del.icio.us.

Thanks to Bigbold’s RSS Digest, anyone not geek enough to know how to hack an rss feed (ie me) can now stream any page’s feed onto their site.

It’s timing is perfect. As you may or may not have noticed, this blog can go silent for days on end when things get hectic with me. I’m not offline. I’m still stumbling upon great stuff online. It’s that I just don’t have time to sit down and type out a post about everything I’m finding. That’s where my del.icio.us bookmarks come in. I’ve been bookmarking cool stuff with plans on posting about it later. But of course that never happens and the del.icio.us bookmarks remain unnoticed, unread and unloved.

But not anymore, with the start of my “del.icio.us five” list on the right side of this blog. Now when I don’t have time to blog, but I find something worth bookmarking it will appear on this site the instant I tag it. It’s like a mini linkblog or sideblog without the hassle of maintaining another blog. Cool.

So, if my posts start to look stale, have a look at my del.iciou.us five, they’re sure to be slightly more fresh and just as tasty.

tagged: [del.icio.us] [blogging] [tech]

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Goodbye Gen Y, Hello Gen M

In our never-ending need to assign letters to people younger than us, the Kaiser Family Foundation hereby dubs the recent crop of kids: Generation M. As in media. Why?

“Children and teens are spending an increasing amount of time using “new media” like computers, the Internet and video games, without cutting back on the time they spend with “old” media like TV, print and music, according to a new study released today by the Kaiser Family Foundation. Instead, because of the amount of time they spend using more than one medium at a time (for example, going online while watching TV), they’re managing to pack increasing amounts of media content into the same amount of time each day.”

The study, Generation M: Media in the Lives of 8-18 Year-olds, says that kids are becoming masters of multitasking and although the KFF doesn’t know if that’s good or bad for their health, it’ll certainly help them in the hectic modern workplace.

The study focuses young people’s consumption of media and raises some interesting concerns regarding media in the bedroom and parental supervision.

In addition to these findings on their media consumption, I’d like to see more studies about how much media young people are producing via blogs, zines, podcasts, etc. Somewhere in there, I feel, we will find a healthy balance of consumption and production by those rascally Gen-Mers.

The Pitch That Time Forgot Lives!

Back in November, I wrote about the Pitch that Time Forgot, an article pitch that I submitted to a magazine that seemed to disappear into the ether. About six months went by and I hadn’t heard back about the fate of my article idea. Long story short – I eventually heard back and got the go-ahead on the article and I was a happy writer.

I researched the article and was ready to start writing when I got a frantic email from my editor, also a freelancer. She told me to stop all work because the entire staff of the magazine had been laid off. She didn’t know the whether the magazine was going under, but I’d be wise to not do any more work on the commissioned piece.

I called the magazine publisher to get to the bottom of the story and to enquire about my Kill Fee, which I had luckily negotiated into my contract (lesson one from this story: always ensure there is a Kill Fee with any commissioned writing!)

It turned out the magazine wasn’t going under, but was now going to be produced entirely by freelancers to cut costs. So, the magazine was alive and so, possibly, was my article.

I contacted the new editor and gave her my pitch over the phone. She was curious and asked for my original query. This was a little frustrating, but if it meant that my article would see the printed page, I was up for it. If she rejected the pitch, I planned to invoice the publisher for my Kill Fee anyway.

About a month later, the new editor accepted the article pitch and I got the go ahead once again.

So, almost a year after I submitted the original pitch and two editors later, it seems I am to write my little article after all. At the end of the day, the money vs time spent on this pitch won’t work out in my favour. But in my opinion, it’s much better than if the article idea never got printed in the first place. I will receive some compensation for my time and effort (also this is my first piece with the magazine, which could lead to more.)

Moral of the story: the obvious one is if you’ve taken the time to write a pitch and send it off, make sure that you get paid for it eventually! Less obvious moral? Writing is the easy part of a writer’s job. Selling your work is the hard part.

On that note, I’m off wrap up the year-long saga and actually write the darn article!