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Fake Hookers + Fake Credit Cards + Fake 13yr olds = Marketing?
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by JD Rucker | May 24, 2008 at 05:48 pm
83550 views | 20 Recommendations | 9 comments
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Fake Hookers + Fake Credit Cards + Fake 13yr olds = Marketing?
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What a virtual world we travel through sometimes. A (relatively) innocent marketing ploy designed to draw in backlinks for a financial services comparison website in London has stirred up media attention ranging from the front page of Digg to coverage on Fox News.
When money.co.uk posted a story titled 13 Year Old Steals Dad's Credit Card to Buy Hookers, the idea was that it could be read as a humorous parody piece that could get attention from social media sites, yield quality backlinks, and draw in hundreds of thousands of visitors. The backlinks would help the site achieve higher rankings on search engines, especially for the target keyword phrases that would include the words "Credit Card".
The story did will. Very well. It hit the front page of Digg and rose in the "Top in All Categories" section on its way to nearly 2,500 diggs. It was reviewed over 200 times on StumbleUpon and received moderate attention on Reddit and Mixx. Outside of social media, the story was picked up by several online publications and yielded an estimated 6,000 backlinks for the site.
The problem was that most who read it didn't pick up on the fact that it was fake.
"The thing is, I tried to make it as ridiculous as possible so it would
be obvious that it would be fake," said Lyndon Antcliff, a writer and Internet marketer in an interview on Wired.com.
There is now a disclaimer on the story that says, "This story is a parody and is not intended to be taken seriously."
Some of the news sites that picked it up have removed the story, including news.com.au and GameSpot UK. Others still have the story live, including TV3 and G4TV.
In addition to the disclaimer on the original post, Money.co.uk posted an apology, removed associations with the marketing vendor, and added a sentence to their About page regarding fake stories..
A handful of articles reporting that the story was fake have been posted, but none have been promoted to the front pages of social media sites.
Through all of this, the question must be asked: Are websites being forced to resort to parody to be able to market their services? "Link Bait" is a term that comes to mind that is preached about by many in the search engine optimization world but achieved by only the most skilled. In essence, it refers to any content that, for whatever reason, can draw in natural inbound links from websites.
In this case, the link bait was obviously a wild story. Sometimes it can be a video or story that adds value and the entices related websites to use it as a resource. Other times, it can be a tool or widget that webmasters can put on their sites that will help them (and the source) achieve a desired goal.
With the heavy emphasis that search engines place on inbound links, many websites are desperate for any form of viral link-building. It may not be "ethical" through some perspectives, but it is arguably justifiable in the competitive Internet marketplace.
Until the search engines come up with a better ranking system, we can expect sensationalized parodies to continue to pop up.
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JD Rucker
Ladera Ranch, California, United States
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at 17:59 on May 24th, 2008
JD Rucker, I like this story. It's good stuff. I had no idea that story was a fake - I remember when it came out. I can understand how that sort of story will generate readership but I hope this is not going to become the norm - it could make any kind of story that is slightly outrageous questionable as to whether it is true.
Good piece though.
at 19:20 on May 24th, 2008
I agree. It works, but I don't like it. This particular piece was perfect for its purposes: so outrageous that social media and news sources would take a look, but not too outrageous to where it was clearly fake. Suspension of disbelief without pushing it over the limit.
at 19:26 on May 24th, 2008
JD Rucker, I like this story. It's good stuff.
In the age of instant media who really has time to check sources?
Shrinking newspaper budgets also means less people to do the checking.
I don't see too much difference between this case and this one:
Pentagon's Media Manipulation on War Extended to Newspapers
The New York Times today published a massive piece by David Barstow on how the Pentagon for years has secretly deployed a large crew of retired military officers to flood the airwaves – network and cable – to offer pro-war talking points to the unsuspecting viewers.
at 20:27 on May 24th, 2008
JD Rucker, I like this story. It's good stuff.
at 07:30 on May 25th, 2008
JD Rucker, I like this story. It's good stuff.
at 11:31 on May 25th, 2008
The story about the story about the story from the source at Cornwall
at 18:08 on May 25th, 2008
Cmon? really? Look... Im a real marketer. Ive studied and spent much of my life to learn real marketing, and what this guy was doing, about getting inbound links, is more TECHNICAL ENGINEERING than marketing. He wrote an outrageous story, to drive a technical tactic.
The real story here, is that the media corporations did not check the facts of the story, and got justly embarassed by it, because they did not do the appropriate fact checking. A common practice in the last few years, and in stories of even greater world wide significance than keywords like hookers, child, and credit card.
JD, your article main point is a good one, but your headline... a little bit on the sensationalist, and inaccurate, side as well.
Just doing my part to improve accuracy.
at 18:59 on May 25th, 2008
Fair enough - a sensationalized headline for a story about a sensationalized fake news piece. On that, I agree.
As far as whether the tactic is technical engineering or marketing, that's definitely debatable. Since many websites selling services and products rely on the search engines as their "bread and butter", it can and should be considered a part of their entire marketing campaign. For sites like these, no form of banner ad or television ad or radio spot will eve drive the kind of targeted traffic that they need.
This is a classic case of search engine optimization meets social media marketing. It's definitely not called social media technical engineering.
at 03:21 on May 26th, 2008
This will be interesting to watch as it develops. While one might do this sort of story to sell credit cards, you could get into a lot of legal trouble doing a similar story strictly to market a product like pharmaceuticals. I'm all for aonline users enjoying a good practical joke, but marketing like this must be pretty cautious or it could escalate into a nightmare of an Orwellian scenario.