Echo Boom

For those of you who have never heard of viral marketing, it is a relatively new technique that marketers have spent the last decade perfecting.

Essentially, it consists of person-to-person ‘grassroots’ campaigns that rely on the consumer to spread the word about a given product to other consumers to create a more legitimate buzz about a particular product. This technique is critical today as many tweens have grown sceptical about the direct techniques and practices commonly used to advertise to them.

According Juliet Schor in her book ‘Born to Buy’ there are five components for a successful buzz marketing campaign which include:

1. Authenticity – Staying true to the brand
2. Advocacy – The consumer plays a direct role in advocating the product to other consumers
3. Experiential Messaging – Where the company often gives the product to the buzz agent or consumer advocate so they are more sincere when they talk about the product to others
4. Fusion of Strategies – Combination of a viral marketing strategy is typically complimented with a public relations campaign
5. Visibility and Virality – Done through a number of overt and covert actions

If the viral marketing campaign sounds elaborate that’s because it is. Perhaps the most important thing to pay attention to is that tweens are being asked to sell products and gain valuable information directly from their friends in covert manners.

For example, Schor talks about the successful “Slumber Party in a Box” put together by Girls Intelligence Agency, a buzz marketing agency. Tween girls who decide to join their “Best Friends Forever” (BFF) network are given products to discuss among their friends during the evening. The GIA agent is given the special task of recording what is said about the product and then reports back to the agency; creating a very intimate focus group and means of disseminating information about any given product at the party. GIA boasts that they can reach up to 20Million girls nation wide and their clients range from Disney to Warner Brothers to Mattel.

Another powerful player in the field of viral marketing is BzzAgent. This company was started by Dave Balter who is also the founding member of WOMMA, the “Word-of-Mouth Marketing Agency”. It involves a very elaborate network of bzz agents that chose various bzz campaigns they are interested in promoting among their friends. In exchange agents get rewarded points that they can use to trade in for any number of items that have been donated to BzzAgent by corporations. In fact, even the very nature of choosing the free items for ones hard work is part of the market research to gauge popularity of products among the agents.

Viral Marketing is only getting perfected. it is important to understand this new practice to see just how cheaply tweens are being sold off to sell out their friends.

Below is a quote written by Susan George that was quoted by Henry Giroux at the Engaging Interpretation lecture series at Emily Carr last week.

"In 1945 or 1950, if you had seriously proposed any of the ideas and policies in today's standard neo-liberal toolkit, you would have been laughed off the stage or sent off to the insane asylum... the idea that the market should be allowed to make major social and political decisions, the idea that the State should voluntarily reduce its role in the economy, or that corporations should be given total freedom that trade unions should be curbed and citizens given much less rather than more social protection -- such ideas were utterly foreign to the spirit of the time. Even if someone actually agreed with these ideas, he or she would have hesitated to take such a position in pubic and would have had a hard time finding an audience."

I find this quote extremely provocative. Just how are notions of privitizations and market control so normalized in our society? And just how far will this go? While it is impossible to compare Canada to the United States it would be naive to dismiss the increasing support of the neoliberal agenda in our own backyard. This agenda really hit home when I attended a forum on the Commercialism of Schools on Saturday.

When it comes to public education, I think we should all be paying attention. With increased reliance on corporate donors it is no longer uncommon to have your grade 3 son or daughter come home singing the theme song of Home Depot (which they learned at school on your tax dollar) and wearing their corporate logo on their shirt because they paid for the playground at your child's elementary school. As was the case in North Vancouver last year. Nor is it uncommon to have corporations trying to dictate what should or should not be included in teachers' curriculum - as was the case for the Vancouver School Board who received a letter from McDonalds urging them not to allow the film Super Size Me be shown in classrooms. However, corporatization of education does not just extend to product placement or direct marketing to students it is also occurring at higher levels of government.

The BC government is a strong believer in the neoliberal credo which dictates that the market knows best. In 2002, the Provincial Liberal government took a good swing at publicly funded education and agreed on an amendment to the School Act in Bill 34. The result, public schools in BC are now allowed to incorporate themselves into School District Business Companies. Thus, School districts can now become 'entrepreneurs' and set up ventures in order to bring their schools additional income; such as the establishment of offshore private schools in China. While this may sound innocent, many critics warn that this approach is only going to increase the division between the have and have not districts who are now being left with the responsibility of financing themselves, with less and less government support.

Another new revenue tactic being deployed by the BC liberal government is the foreign student. Foreign students now make up 7% o BC's public system's operating budget. Like in post secondary institutions, foreign students must pay tuition to attend public schools, which is usually around $10,000. Between 2000–01 and 2001–02, the number of international students jumped from 2,947 to 4,035 which resulted in a net gain of in roughly $40 million. The result, school districts are now competing for these students creating a large gap between districts that can afford to attract students and those that cannot. What's more, many of these students have very low levels of English comprehension, which has a direct impact on the classroom, particularly as many of the ESL positions no longer exist due to the Liberal's 20% budget cut from Education. Read more here.

While it is hard to believe that this is really happening we must take a long look at ourselves and ask a very serious question - is this the best our kids deserve? How can we expect our kids to be critically engaged and active citizens when they are amidst such strong contradictions that are actively encouraged by our own apathy and compliance? We must lose our ephemeral perspectives that never extend beyond the immediate moment in question and start asking ourselves serious questions. Perhaps the most important, says COPE School Board Trustee, Kevin Milsip, "is do we want to pay now or punish them later..."

Here are some links:
School ADS Alert
BC Teachers Federation