Wed 21 Jan 2009
What Kind of Advertising do You Trust?
Posted by Jeff Tomlin under Reputation
[5] Comments
There was a story in the New York Times about Belkin paying people for writing positive reviews. This was an interesting story to me. Apparently, a Belkin employee was paying people to write favorable reviews on sites like Amazon. The general reaction was very negative and a general concensus was that this represents very poor reputation management practices. But I began to take a more critical look at this and wondered how it was really different from other forms of advertising.
1. How is the intention different from a company paying for an ad in certain media and claiming a poor product is very good? Consider a company that has consumer reports, community feedback and perhaps even internal research which confirms to them that their product or service is poor.
2. How is this different from an infomercial where a well know personality is paid to endorse a product or service?
3. Is this different from a company paying a subject matter expert for a product review. Consider different types of marketing arrangements. Sometimes an expert is paid money for a review and sometimes there is a mutual co-marketing arrangement in place.
4. Consider companies that pay people to send business their way on a referral basis. Have you ever been to a place like Cancun Mexico and if you ask someone directions to a restaurant or bar, they give you a business card of a place with their initial on the back. They are paid a referral.
5. What about sites that just sell ads and link to ‘great services’.
I guess the key question here, is what actually makes advertising and promotion reputable?
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For me, the part that makes their behaviour distasteful is that it’s not apparent that the review is funded by Belkin.
“Normal” advertising is clearly funded by the company promoting its own products. Infomercials have a similar quality — it’s pretty obvious that someone paid to put that content on TV.
The examples that follow the infomercial are where it starts ro get grey, because it’s difficult to tell whether there was financial incentive or not.
I suppose this is the nice thing about paid results on Google — it’s very obvious which results are showing up because of a financial transaction, and which results are showing up because they fit Google’s search algorithms.
That’s a good point Tony. Google has tried to go out of their way to make it obvious who has paid them for a link. It’s similar to TV commercials and the disclaimers you see before an infomercial is played. Things get fuzzy in the advertising world though when you see endorsements and even read reviews. You don’t know what the connection is between the reviewer and the company.
In response to your question: “I guess the key question here, is what actually makes advertising and promotion reputable?”, I would say: “The absence of deception”.
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