Blog #11

I think viral marketing is really interesting. Marketing used to be about billboards and radio ads and well-dressed sleazy salesmen, but now the line between content we seek out and content that someone paid for us to see is becoming increasingly thin. It can be hard to tell what's an ad now. There are even advertising agencies that specialize in engineering the concept of virality. They can buy hundreds of upvotes on Reddit for almost no money and then use network effects to drive hundreds of thousands of people to engage with their content, regardless of whether or not it would have taken off on its own. It helps ad agencies engineer this virality if they know more about the people they're marketing for. That's what makes our interests, skills, occupational information so valuable to marketers, because if they know exactly who we are they'll know exactly what we'll buy. It's easier to spread something virally if they know as much as possible about the people who will be viewing it. Is it ethical to design advertising disguised as content to sell a product? I don't think it is necessarily but it certainly can be done immorally. I don't think advertisers should be able to access details about our personal lives. The only data advertisers should have access to should be surface level, impersonal and unidentifiable as a quality that a person possesses. The product being sold should be able to stand on its own, and not need shady marketing tactics in order to gain traction. The trick to viral marketing isn't, in my opinion, marketing. Companies should be building products that people want to share with others on the merit of the product alone.