Response: Death of Buzz Marketing…Are you Mad!

Buzz Marketing Changes
We couldn’t help but notice recently (largely because it was the cover story), that Marketing Week has decided to announce the death of buzz marketing of the back of some planned changes to the regulation of the industry.

Well, what can we say other than; “that’s an enormous leap to make, are you mad?”

Seriously though, we know cover stories have to grab the attention, pull the viewer in and sell the publication but really…

We’d better start by relating the salient points of the article; A new consumer regulation named Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading 2008 looks set to make a large impact on the world of advertising by clamping down on stealth marketing practises.

These new regulations are to be introduced by the Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.

They will, essentially, make it illegal to evangelise or promote a brand without first making it clear that the positive message is being delivered on behalf of or by the brand (or its owners) itself.

This will cover blogs, traditional media, face to face communication and viral marketing – all forms of message transmission in short!

At least one high-profile industry figure has gone on record as saying that the new regs are the “biggest shake-up in the UK laws affecting marketing and advertising ever.”

This may be so…but the end of the line for buzz marketing? We think not.

All this new legislation is likely to do is to make it increasingly difficult for agencies that employ dubious techniques to operate.

It’s true that everyone within the industry will have to audit themselves more rigorously in case they’re overstepping the mark in any aspect of a campaign – but that can only be a good thing can’t it?

Agencies that seek to stay ahead of the game ditched the idea of misleading advertising a while back having correctly predicted the future for that aspect of marketing – after all, it was never likely to remain legal was it? More than that; public response to stealth marketing has always been exceedingly bad (no one likes to be hoodwinked) and, when used, it often delivers a reaction that negates any initial positive effect, rendering it useless in the long term as an advertising technique. Consequently any marketer with sense steers well clear of it!

So, at this juncture all but the shadiest and stupidest of operators has left stealth marketing a long way behind, preferring instead to concentrate on new and imaginative methods of brand promotion.

Bearing all this in mind we find it rather odd that a set of regulations cracking down on an outdated and (in the long term) ineffectual marketing method used by only a tiny minority of current marketers has been hailed as the “death of buzz marketing”!

Still, cover stories have to be sensational don’t they?

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