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Guerilla phone marketing draws wrath of Kibo

Spam thesps

Letters SonyEricsson's elaborate scheme to hire thesps posing as mobile phone users has drawn an immediate response from angry - grrr! - Register readers.

Look out, luvvies.

If Sony is hiring actors to spontaneously go into praise about their phones, I'm going to spontaneously kick some actors' in the ass!

Vincent Giovannone

Even Americans are growing immune to such shamless hucksterism, writes an American reader:-

We already knew that Sony's public relations people are jackasses; perhaps they are trying to break their own standing record. Do you recall their famous Grand Canyon ad?

It begins with a tight shot of a child, who shouts, "Mom, Dad! Look, the Grand Canyon!"

He then runs across the ground to point to a television showing a picture of the Grand Canyon, itself sitting at the rim of the actual Grand Canyon. The family ignores the real Grand Canyon in the background, staring in rapt attention at the television.

Americans, normally lethargic, unobservant and slow to react, were so offended that the ad was pulled in two days.

Bob Watkins

And the news has spurred James 'Kibo' Parry to produce a Kibo spectacular. Kibo rightly calls this a kind of spam, only a human three-dimensional form of spam. Highlights, which he kindly forwarded to us, include the following observations:-

Very soon, you will encounter people who are paid to bother you in person.

From now on, there will be no difference between "a commercial" and "an obnoxious jerk". You'll be spammed in 3-D, at point-blank range!



If I were hanging out in a bar or nightclub, would I say I was a total loser paid to pretend to be interested in people there?


That job's just as humiliating as wearing the big foam-rubber Goofy costume at Disneyland except without the thick layer of foam rubber to keep people from seeing your tortured facial expression.



[WSJ]:"It's deceptive," says Gary Ruskin, executive director of Commercial Alert, a nonprofit organization founded by consumer activist Ralph Nader, when told about the campaign. "People will be fooled into thinking this is honest buzz."


NO, REALLY? YOU MEAN FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER PEOPLE WILL PRETEND TO LIKE A PRODUCT? THEY'D NEVER BE ALLOWED TO DO THAT IN TV COMMERCIALS!



You know, if this product was any good, they could just GIVE sixty of these phones to sixty people who like digital camera, and they'd USE them to take pictures, and it would accomplish the same thing, except they wouldn't have to hire LIARS.

Righteous stuff. The full thoughts of Chairman Kibo can be found here, in

alt.religion.kibology

.



So: Beware of Spam Thesps. ®

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