THE IDEA EMERGED over a refreshing Starbucks® Tazo®, just as the sensational Gorillaz album kicked in on my elegant new iPod nanoTM. After 220 years of cowardly evasion, this will be the first Times op-ed actively to solicit product placement. To a generation weaned on HeatTM and Big BrotherTM, it no longer seems relevant simply to offer comment shorn of commercial context. So get in touch, marketers, whether you want a mention for Pampers® or CampersTM. Let’s see if we can strike a deal.

The Zeitgeist would demand nothing less. As the advertising industry panics over the blunting of its conventional tools, a new portfolio of covert marketing techniques is emerging under the radar. The 30-second commercial may have been mortally wounded by ad-skipping technologies and the gods iPod and PlayStation, but as a result the sales pitch is evolving to reach consumers wherever they happen to be. Suddenly we are being bombarded with commercial messages in what used to be considered neutral public or social spaces, from train carriages to private parties. Yet unlike the old regulated model, the industry’s new wizardry is being practised in an anarchic no man’s land.

Whether or not television advertising is “dead”, as some gurus insist, brand managers are certainly confronting their biggest crisis in 50 years. Corporations from Unilever to Procter & Gamble are slashing their TV-ad spend in search of more cost-effective ways of driving sales. For McDonald’s, that means redefining old-style marketing as “brand journalism”, a restless quest for new ways to tell the brand “story” through education packs or sponsored rap songs. Other firms are clamouring for attention amid the clutter using “viral” online films, sponsoring “podcast” audio shows, even paying individuals to have logos tattooed on to their bodies — a presumably short-lived trend known as “skinvertising”. Fundamentally, such strategies do not differ greatly from traditional mailshots or radio commercials. The problem begins when commercial messages are no longer packaged as such.

The current excitement relates to product placement, in which brands are inserted in an entertainment or editorial context. Ever since Reese’s Pieces sweets underwent a sales boom after featuring in the 1982 film E.T., Hollywood studios have been bombarded with cash or marketing support in exchange for favourable mentions. What’s new is the growing demand for these often unacknowledged deals in video gaming, TV programming and print. In June, it emerged that Toyota was in discussions with a number of magazine publishers to include references to its Lexus cars within editorial copy, while a new food magazine, Relish, was reported to be giving advertisers the opportunity to include their brands as recipe ingredients. Nothing unusual, perhaps, for an industry whose fashion or travel pages rely on gifts or sponsorship. The difference now is the marketers’ presumption that the financial relationship will remain undisclosed to readers.

The next target is television entertainment. Charles Allen, head of ITV, recently added his voice to calls to relax restrictions on paid product placement in Britain, citing American “successes” such as Lost and 24 — even as the Writers Guild of America was protesting that such “branded entertainment” was distorting storylines and destroying creativity. Already BBC dramas are reportedly promoting products in exchange for payment, an allegation that recently embarrassed the corporation. But with Ofcom, the media regulator, reconsidering the rules, few in the industry doubt that the lines between entertainment and commerce will blur further.

Television, at least, remains a highly regulated medium. The same cannot be said for the more covert new advertising media. Today, if you want your product noticed, a growing number of “word of mouth” agencies will arrange for its benefits to be talked up in everyday social gatherings. These “buzz marketers” offer cash or gifts to socially well-connected volunteers to promote the latest brand of sausage or mineral water among friends and family. And no, you need not declare that said brand has paid to be talked about, according to advice from BzzAgent, one of the biggest such firms.

Alternatively, you can arrange for fake grassroots weblogs to sing your product’s praises, or for it to feature in chatroom conversations. No requirement there to be legal, decent, honest or truthful — a particular benefit if you are trying to market to children. Alternatively, you can hoodwink consumers by hiring actors to use your product in public: Sony Ericsson paid 60 actors to play tourists wanting their pictures taken; when passers-by obliged, they were handed the latest “easy to use” camera phone. Or, if you run a drugs company, why not hire a celebrity to go around discussing their miracle cure? When BBC Radio 2 interviewed Sir Stirling Moss about his erectile difficulties this year, listeners were not informed about his relationship with Bayer, makers of Levitra.

At least with conventional advertising, consumers knew where we were: we could turn the page, or return after the break. Its replacement is far more insidious. If we are not aware that we are being sold to, how much more powerful is that message? And if that message is dishonestly manipulative, how much more vulnerable are we?

Vance Packard argued as much 50 years ago, when The Hidden Persuaders exposed the marketing industry’s last great experiment in psychological manipulation. In Packard’s day it was “mass psychoanalysts” and “depth probers” who sought to manipulate consumers beneath their level of awareness. They have been replaced in their magic by “neuromarketers” and “behavioural targeters”, but their goal remains the same.

Respectable ad agencies, of course, will insist that their own ethical standards are unimpeachable. If so, why don’t a few of the biggest get together to create an independent watchdog, charged with establishing guidelines for navigating advertising’s murky new waters, and with the teeth to embarrass transgressors? They could call it the Persuaders’ Complaints Commission. It might actually sell.

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