Next time someone accuses you of being cynical, just blame Tah Intarwebs.  Apparently we’re all turning into skeptics, thanks to so-called viral marketing, and blogs which look like they’re done by Joe and Jane Average, but which are actually created to promote products and services.  

One recent example:  the YouTube video which has been viewed about 3 million times since it was uploaded on January 18th:  Bride Has Massive Hair Wig Out.  That little performance, with an about-to-be-married woman freaking out over her hairdo and taking the scissors to it, was actually an initiative from a haircare products company – although the product was never mentioned or shown.  

A blog, supposedly written by a hip hop artist named Charlie who wanted a Sony PlayStation Portable for Christmas, was later outed as having been done by the company as a marketing tool.  And another one, ostensibly created by regular folks who wanted to document their adventures traveling across the country in RVs and sleeping in Wal-Mart parking lots, turned out to be a promotion done by the chain’s PR agency.

Gillian Watson, a social psychologist at UBC, says that these fake blogs – or flogs, as they’ve been tagged – exploit our trust, and it’s only a matter of time before we’ll look on all kinds of genuine postings as just another ad of some sort.  

Well, the signs are already there:  the other day on Digg dot com, I saw this:



Of course, many of the commenters were yowling about how it was obviously a fake, put together in Photoshop or something, and it made me wish that I still had a certain picture I shot in Cancun about ten years ago – a picture which looked almost exactly like that.  I’d love to be able to upload that one and read the comments from all those “experts” who know fakery when they see it.  

Oh, well.  I guess I’ll just have to go back to Cancun and shoot another one.  

Read more about the growing online skepticism phenomenon at The National Post.

Maybe I'm just tired, but I don't see anything wrong with that picture! Some one help me out here.

While the issue of "flogs" may be real enough, the photo looks real enough to me.

I actually have one of those visual moments seared into my brain from a trip to Nassau many years ago. (And another from a little hot-springs adventure.)

Meanwhile, that agencies are willing to go to such covert lengths to advertise their products suggests there is more to advertising than just demanding consumers to support a store - the standard-issue strategy of radio commercial production.

A healthy dose of skepticism these days isn't a bad thing. This kind of trickery has been going on for a long time in every medium of communication.

I wish all ads were flogs.  They are entertaining and don't hit you in the head with the product.

I admit I was fooled by the amazingly realistic performance of the wigged-out bride.

It's amazing how ordinarily gullible people will cry "fake" at real amazing photos.

Here's a fake photo I created with the help of Skyscraperpage.com webmaster Dylan LeBlanc. On the left, The Bay Centre mall in Victoria has been replaced by a drawing of Vancouver's modernist Sears/Pacific Centre mall. A simple rendering of Vancouver's black TD tower is at right to show scale.



Here I proposed Victoria's Inner Harbour be turned into Stanley Park:



In this one, I show Mel Cooper and Governor-General Campagnolo enjoying the new exhibit in the Crystal Garden showing BC's #1 export:

Good stuff! (And yes, I can be tricked. In fact, I prefer it that way.)

And yeah, Flamer - if only.