GoViral are spammers
Yesterday I wrote a story entitled: Coca Cola spam reaches Norway.
By today, the news media has gotten in on the game, and there are comments from Coca Cola in various places.
Coca Cola says they’re within the Norwegian law, but my guess is they’re going to lose that one. Two “viral campaigns” have been linked together by lazy spammers using the same forum ID for both campaigns. One of those campaigns looks like an amateur video. There are no logos anywhere, except the bottle on the table. It’s a clear case of infraction against the law in Norway. The law says (paraphrased) that advertizements need to be clearly marked as advertizements. You can’t advertize and disguise it as editorial content, for instance. That’s against the law. So this is clearly against the law. And since it’s been linked by forum ID with another campaign, that identifies the product clearly, there’s no doubt.
Coca Cola has admitted to hiring marketing companies that use viral marketing. In other words, they’ve admitted to spamming, but prefers not using the term spamming.
The company Coca Cola says did the “viral marketing”, is GoViral. They’ve got several offices around the world, including one in Sweden (at least one IP implicated in the spamming was Swedish).
It doesn’t really matter if this company spamvertizes videos that then include product placements or commercials - as opposed to posting links. Mass posting on forums with a commercial aim, is spamming. The spamming has a different aim - getting direct clicks from users, as opposed to gaining good ranking in search engines. Which is where part of the webspam industry is headed anyway. Still spam…
So, GoViral are spammers, and should be scrutinized in the future. What they’re doing is no better than what Russian spammers are doing (just less obvious and less easy to suss out), so no going easy on them.
I’m tired of these Viral marketing people thinking that creating a advertisement campaign in the disguse of some video on YouTube or street propoganda is so cute and will boost their profits. If anything, all it does is desensitized people from making good decisions based on sound advice. I’m also tired of hearing about Paris Hiton eating a ham sandwich every time I watch the evening news. There could have been a horrible case of arson on the far end of town and the mass media (owned by big corporations as satired in this video) MANUFACTURES this news in hopes that no one will pay attention but only buy more crap. That is the fault of consumerism. Tell people what they want to here just to get them to buy things by MANUFACTURING news that sells the product or MANUFACTURING viral marketing campaigns to influnce people. I’m tired of being told that choices make my life confusing and that the easy solution is to take the mainstream even if it is bad for you.