December 5, 2004
markets are creative
BzzAgents. Volunteer armies of no-life lamester peons willing to systematically pimp your product to their families and friends for no reward other than “the chance to be part of something”. Long article from The New York Times.
This might be the most peculiar thing about BzzAgent: not only are its volunteer agents willing to become shock troops in the marketing revolution, but many of them are flat-out excited about it. At his apartment, Desjardins told me about another book he had read because of BzzAgent. Called ”Join Me,” it’s about a guy who decides he wants to start some sort of voluntary group — a commune, a cult, whatever you want to call it. He puts an ad in the paper that just says, ”Join me,” and to his surprise, people are interested. They didn’t know what they were joining, or why, but they joined anyway. The guy, whose name is Danny Wallace, decided to turn his followers into a good-deeds army, basically on the ”Pay It Forward” method. The book is nonfiction.
Great. Another crap idea from the happy, fun world of marketing. Re-arranging deckchairs on The Titanic etc.
“I know! Let’s reward people to go to their friends’ websites and leave comment spam!”
BzzAgents are the offline equivalent.
[A MUCH BETTER IDEA:] From Evelyn Rodriguez. How Clif Bars (a high-energy nutrition bar for athletes) got the job done by simply preferring to “be at the event and have people interact with the product.”
“Being a small company forces us to think hard about what we’re doing and what our brand stands for,” O’Loughlin says. “It makes us more creative.”
“Markets are conversations.” We know that already.
Markets are creative. Think about it.
[UPDATE:] Just left the following in the comment section:
Jack, I’m not dissing BzzAgents because I think it’s “wrong” or “immoral”. If people want to squander their social capital on pimping supermarket-level products, fine. It’s their life.
I think BzzAgents is a “crap” idea simply because it doesn’t solve the client’s fundemental problem i.e. nobody sincerely wants to talk about their product.
BzzAgents offers a solution without really knowing much about the actual, deeper problem.
The tanking of solution-driven business models is a big issue (nay, HUGE issue) in the advertising business, not just with low-level crap like this, but in the most respected agencies in the world. And this is what is going to sink them in the end (hence The Titanic metaphor).
I also just left the following comment over at Adpulp:
I do not believe the “salvation” of the ad industry is going to happen. I think it’s just “slow, painful demise” from now on. With or without Lovemarks, Cluetrain, Hughtrain, or any other whatsit that comes along.
I suspect what primarily irritates the Cluetrain crowd about Lovemarks is the latter seems to be offering Big Business a post-iceberg sister ship to replace the Titanic, when right now what’s really needed are a few damn good lifeboats.
[UPDATE:] From Russell Buckley. “I thought you’d be interested in this idea about the concept that execs in dying industries go through similar experiences that dying people and their families often experience: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.
I applied it to the record industry, but can it be morphed to the ad industry in its final days? Certainly we have had a fair share of denial. But the rest…?”
[UPDATE:] William Gibson (of Sci-Fi novel Neuromancer fame) writes about BzzAgents:
Pattern Recognition isn’t “about a future”, of course, and the present reality, judging by this piece, is one in which corporations have become so powerful that they can *recruit unpaid volunteers* to infiltrate your life and talk up products — a twist I evidently wasn’t quite paranoid enough to imagine.
Boy, I bet Hamish is REALLY happy now! Thanks to Brendan for the link.
I’d disagree that it’s crappy. It’s getting people blowing hot air about a product for very little personal gain. Okay, crappy for the agents, but great for the companies involved. Marketing mass produced sausages is not like marketing Web sites or niche products. Owning the conversation in a mass market is tough (although Volvo had a great, though too high-brow, crack at it with the “Life on Board” campaign) and this is clearly filling a lot of the cracks in someone’s marketing puzzle.
Yeah, I wrote a piece about this earlier today.
http://truetalk.typepad.com/truetalk/2004/12/why_bzz.html
I think this will be a very short-lived methodology…just long enough for people to become immediately suspicious of anything one’s friends recommend!
The Hidden Persuaders
New York Times provides a detailed analysis on the growth in word of mouth marketing firms recruiting agents to ‘buzz’ their clients’ products. NYT ArticleGaping Void Comment
Isn’t the BzzzAgents thing essentially the same thing as the blogads on the right hand side of the page? Yes, they’re paid for, but like the Bzzz agents, you don’t have to push products that you don’t want to.
I guess the difference here is that we know the blogads are ads.
But some blog-advertising sites do pay bloggers for mentioning products in their blog entries. Are they really any better or worse than BzzzAgents?
[insert “I blog to make money…” cartoon]
Aren’t we all trying to find Muses that we can engage with (rather than having to keep up with the Jones folk next door) which seems to be the fear that BzzAgents seem to prey on?
‘The Muses were women in mythology. They did not teach or require to be worshipped, but they were a source of inspiration. They taught you how to cultivate your emotions through the different arts in order to reach a higher plane. What is lacking now, I believe, is somewhere you can get that stimulation not information, but stimulation where you can meet just that person, or find just that situation, which will give you the idea of invention, of carrying out some project which interests you, and show how it can become a project of interest to other people.’
From:
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Theodore_Zeldin
Link to:
http://www2.rnw.nl/rnw/en/features/cultureandhistory/040702vh.html
Jack, I’m not dissing BzzAgents because I think it’s “wrong” or “immoral”. If people want to squander their social capital on pimping supermarket-level products, fine. It’s their life.
I think BzzAgents is a “crap” idea simply because it doesn’t solve the client’s fundemental problem i.e. nobody sincerely wants to talk about their product.
BzzAgents offers a solution without really knowing much about the actual, deeper problem.
The tanking of solution-driven business models is a big issue (nay, HUGE issue) in the advertising business, not just with low-level crap like this, but in the most respected agencies in the world. And this is what is going to sink them in the end (hence The Titanic metaphor).
Hugh ~
I was wondering how long before we’d disagree on a topic!
Actually, I don’t think we’re THAT far apart from each other…
You say nobody wants to genuinely talk about a product, I say that *someone* had to be the first person to download Firefox.
BzzAgent is simply trying to cultivate those people and make them accessible to their clients. I started to type my full reply here, but it got a bit lengthy.
I’m an active BzzAgent, and I’ve voiced (typed?) my opinion in today’s Brain|Blog entry:
http://tinyurl.com/3lhne
Wow ! I just took the Lovemarks ™ test for my website using the Lovemarks Profiler: “It doesn’t look like Mildew Hall has the level of respect it needs in order to become a Lovemark”. I had to answer “no” to “Does Mildew Hall perform as best in class each and every time?” because from time to time I mistype a link and visitors get a 404. Better to be honest eh ? BTW is this Lovemarks thing for real ?
This five stages is a real good one. I discuss this a lot with my wife, who is a psychiatrist with a lot of experience, and the whole DAGA thing, (Denial, Anger, Grief, Acceptance) is very real.
I work with huge software systems for banks, and the whole cycle is very very clear. “There is no problem. What the hell, how did this happen, Oh my God, this is a disaster, Hey, this might actually allow us to improve.” (Actually allow me to shaft my internal rivals, and improve my political situation, but it’s acceptance of a kind…)
Incidentally, here is a dilemma. How to get a manager on a 12 month incentive package to give a flying f*ck about a three year project. It goes more like “denial, denial, new job, denial, denial, oopps, there went the market.” Another reason why a badly conceived corporate structure is a death knell for any kind of creative enterprise. The command and control of a hiearchy like, I dunno, the army or a 1950’s corporation is now the problem, not the solution. Right, Cluetrain fans?
Heh. Back to the cardboard spaceship. Whoosh, whoosh.
Good interview today about the “Power of Buzz” with Dave Balter of BzzAgent and Rob Walker the author of the NY Times article on NPR’s “The Connection”.
Audio is archived and free:
http://www.theconnection.org/shows/2004/12/20041206_b_main.asp
you said it. i have humbly been racking whatever little brain i have about marketing. there is hardly anything out there that thrills me much, and i know, have experienced and act on word of mouth. in your posting you have articulated something that goes along the line of my own take on BuzzAgent. marketing may, to save its name, need a good healthy reinvention, BuzzAgent is not it. what is?
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/blog/blog.asp
William Gibson is talking about the same thing this morning. Turns out, he wrote a book about this years ago.
Prescient and terrifying.
BzzAgents, Word-of-Mouth Marketing and the Future
I reckon HUgh says it all: if nobody “wants to talk about” your product in a spontaneous relevant manner then … it’s because your brand is not relevant enough to get inside the average consumer radar. Therefore why forcing a “conversation” if the theme is not interesting to the listener?
Argh… my boss passed around copies of the article this afternoon with a little ‘this is interesting… we should discuss at the next staff’ post-it note.
Must drink more. …
Great headline: markets are creative.
Someone said that conventional image advertising is the junk mail of the 21st Century. What I see is the mounting evidence that conventional advertising techniques are becoming less effective, whilst at the same time there is an explosion of media channels and a profound change in customer behaviour.
All this offers up new and exciting ways to communicate with customers and drive growth for companies. But the biggest battle is the cultural mindset. All that has gone before is based upon an interruptive model of marketing. Hit em over the head for long enough and we will get a result, school of thought.
Creativity, has been based on witty copyrighting within limited formats of TV spots radio press and DM for example. And the craft of the art director/director/photographer.
But now one truly has the chance to be creative and to understand you can create powerful pull drivers to your brand or business as opposed to the cave troll exercise of bashing people into submission.
Can the old guard really make that leap of faith? As their culture of sameness pervades everything they do.
Equally, it requires a more uncynical approach to marketing communications if one is going to be truly creative. This means you don’t start with, advertising the answer what’s your problem? You start with what’s your problem? Marketing has to be solution driven not format based, it has to understand that communities can drive brands in very different ways. You have to invite people in and make that invitation compelling, uniting people around an idea that they want to be part of.
Creative Markets require applied creative thinking. And your conversations here are about turning marketing the right-side up. Keep up the good work
I’ve been talking to a senior bod who spent 6 years in the Saatchi empire. He reckons nobody really believes in Love Marks within the business, “from Richard Hytner down.”
7:34AM Roundup
Insomnia sucks. Anywho, here’s some stuff to read: The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders was in the NYTimes this weekend, and it’s sparked several discussions already. There’s even a blog spam issue that’s come out of it. I’m still not completely sure…
7:34AM Roundup
Insomnia sucks. Anywho, here’s some stuff to read: The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders was in the NYTimes this weekend, and it’s sparked numerous discussions already. There’s even a blog spam issue that’s come out of it. I’m still not completely sur…
7:34AM Roundup
Insomnia sucks. Anywho, here’s some stuff to read: The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders was in the NYTimes this weekend, and it’s sparked numerous discussions already. There’s even a blog spam issue that’s come out of it. I’m still not completely sur…
I signed up for Bzz at the time of Purple Cow out of interest but immediately realised that I am not inclined to do something for nothing when actively prompted by a third party and that I think is the problem here.
The key phrase from the article is
Word-of-mouth marketing leverages not simply the power of the trendsetter but also, as Balter puts it, ”the power of wanting to be a trendsetter.”
Nuff said!
Bzz off.
Have you read New York Times Magazine’s article on BzzAgent yet? Why the heck not!? I recommend it. No one’s paying me. I swear. Shockeroo! The marketing firm that harnesses the power of being-in-the-know and tipping points annoys people from
The thing that struck me most about the Bzz participants was their expression that being a Bzz Agent was somehow ‘doing something important with their time.’
How sad is that? Are there no hospitals, schools, churches, synagogues, etc. in their towns where they could spend their ‘volunteer’ time?
Paid Word-Of-Mouth An Oxymoron
Broken Type has posted a wicked funny piece on word-of-mouth run amok, as a response to the recent NY Times article on Boston-based w-o-m advocate, Bzz Agent – an article that has several marketing bloggers buzzing. Here’s an excerpt from the Broken…
The BzzAgent is being viewed as such an ‘evil extreme’ by (most) folks who nothing about it aside from the other extremists’ view who based their opinions on assumptions rather than fact.
I doubt the BzzAgent-in-question’s only outlet for ‘doing something important’ was joining BzzAgent… but who knows? Maybe they live a sheltered life.
I read a comment today that assumed a BzzAgent only talks about formal BzzCampaigns instead of finding things on their own. Ridiculous.
I can assure you that when I nominated Hugh and GapingVoid as one of the Fast Company Fast 50 it had nothing to do with a BzzCampaign. It was just another case of finding something I thought was cool, and trying to share it with others who may not have been aware of it.
If a BzzCampaign WAS undertaken for something like…say… Hugh’s StreetCards — I’d certainly sign-up for it, but it’s a product I already like, I’ve already tried, and I’ve already buzzed people about it.
It’s no different than any other BzzCampaign in which I’ve participated — I’ve Bzz’d Seth Godin books, Tom Peters books, and a couple other business books in the same genre, as well as a couple fictional novels.
I’ve done nothing different as a BzzAgent than I would have done in the normal course of finding and recommending books, aside from the fact I received a free copy (and in the case of both Godin camnpaigns I ended up buying 3 add’l copies from bookstores to give as gifts), and I try and log the instances with BzzAgent whenever I’ve told someone about the book.
BzzAgent and its ‘evil deeds’ are really being blown out of proportion.
BzzAgents
I’ve had time to let this BzzAgents thing simmer for a bit, so here’s my .02 on the matter.…..
Experimenting at the Fringes of Marketing
I partly wrote the Open Letter to the Lunatic Fringe of Marketing because I was amazed with all the attention on Lovemarks when something is happening that is a true lunatic fringe, er innovative, experiment in marketing is nearly completely