And Then There's This_ How Stories Live and Die in Viral Culture - Bill Wasik [55]
I gave Cowling the example of the organic grocery chain Whole Foods, a brand I instinctively loathed in part because as a young married, I knew it was the kind of company that expected soon to have its talons in me. Whole Foods had not, to my knowledge, unleashed a viral marketing campaign, at least not yet. How, I asked Cowling, could a company like Whole Foods go “viral” but still convey the basic solidity, even stolidity, that was its primary selling point? Cowling turned the question over in his mind as he talked. “The whole point about social networking online is sharing your identity with people. Your identity as a consumer; your identity as an entertainment consumer,” he said. “Advocating something from Whole Foods is saying something about yourself, so there is a motivator for someone to pass [an ad] on.” Sensibly, Cowling ruled out the cruelty-to-animals route—“Obviously we couldn’t make something like the Ford SportKa viral for Whole Foods; it just doesn’t seem like a fit.” But, as he noted, the Whole Foods brand was wrapped up in a “conversation” about organic food, conservation, the environment. And this, he wisely noted, was “a polarizing conversation. It’s something that can create discussion—perhaps an argument. And like I said, when you have discussion, you have viral. In a lot of ways, Whole Foods would be a really, really good match for a viral campaign, just because it’s a brand that taps into that broader meta-conversation, as it were.”
There was another element to the pigeon spot that we hadn’t discussed yet: a controversy, intentional or no, as to whether the ad had actually been made by Ford. Ambiguity on these matters seemed to have become a common feature of online advertising. Just a few months beforehand, WOMMA had disciplined Edelman, a PR agency, for its having created two fake blogs on behalf of Wal-Mart—one, ironically enough, was called Paidcritics.com, its name referring not its own paid authors but to the “paid critics” who attack Wal-Mart. With viral video ads, pains are frequently taken to misdirect viewers about who is behind an ad or how it was disseminated. Certainly it was true of the Viral Factory’s ads: in a few cases I had seen them without realizing they were intended as ads for anything at all. In one ad for Hewlett-Packard, a home-movie-style video, an anonymous office worker shows off his astonishing finger skills: with his index and middle fingers he kicks around a tiny (computer-generated, it turns out) ball of crumpled yellow paper, pantomiming a soccer player on the field. Only in the background can one see the HP products—a laptop, a printer—placed strategically throughout the shots; also, at the ad’s end, a URL directs viewers to a branded site called FingerSkilz.tv. It was a special effect pretending to be real, and a corporate ad pretending to be user-generated.
Cowling pointed out that just such ambiguities can help to spread a viral ad. “You think it’s user-generated. Is it real? Is it not real?” he said. “You’re looking for an answer somewhere, so you pass it on to someone and you get a conversation going with them.”
But what about the ethical implications? “I don’t believe in deceiving people,” he said. “It’s a question that we do get asked quite a lot: Aren’t you trying to pull the wool over people’s eyes? Are you duping people into partaking in this advertising campaign? The answer to that is: we make entertaining, branded content. It’s generally pretty obvious that it’s branded.” He added: “And if it’s not obvious, then it’s innocuous, you know what I mean?”
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Among the marquee metaphors of the new marketing paradigm, just behind