Marketing Gone Mad: Pandora and Energizer Spam our Forum
I don’t think the CreateDigitalNoise forums are particularly popular, in the scheme of things. We’ve got a couple of hundred real users posting (and several thousand spam registrations - one of the reasons we’re moving to bbPress soon) 7000ish articles.
The only reason we haven’t run away from phpBB sooner is that the Moderators (and myself) are spam destroying ninjas. Most forum spammers thinly veiled attempts to insinuate their commercial pandering in our very serious artistic conversations are very obvious.
However, we’ve recently had a spammer who spent a little time, adding a couple of almost-relevant posts before revealing their flackishness. They started in the "Introduce yourself" thread:
hey party people
wanted to intro myself.
i live in washington dc, i work for a marketing firm and i have been a music groupie my whole life. my mother lived next to mick jagger once — it runs in my blood stream.
see you all on the forums.
Should have noticed the "i work for a marketing firm" bit and just banned them. Oh well. They added two more, slightly confused sounding posts before dropping this bomb in a thread entitled "the strengths and unique qualities of digital sound":
hey all - one of my clients is Energizer and they just released these new beta boards at www.pandoradiscussionarea.com that are a great place for discussions like this and a place to get more advice on gear, sound and the hottest steez. they are also promoting this new iPod battery — SO if you do go Digital with your iPod — you can plug the battery into it for a much longer set….let me know what you think.
Wow. That’s is a particularly pathetic attempt. Especially when you take a look at the site! I’ve had it open in a tab since this morning, marvelling at how terrible it is.
"Exclusive discussion area brought to you by Energizer(R) Energi to go(TM)"
"Portable Power: Mobile DJ’s & electronic artists, discuss your techniques, BPM and strategies here"
If that’s not bad enough, it looks to me like many of the posts within the "discussion area" itself are PR flacks as well:
Lee Fams, on November 12th, 2007 at 1:07 pm Said:
um. can Energizer make a battery for cell phones? My phone/PDA runs out of charge after 5 hours ?!
Energizer should work on cell phone batteries. kthx.
Julian, on November 14th, 2007 at 6:05 am Said:
@Lee Fams, they do.
http://energitogo.com
Depressing stuff. Better forgotten really, except this is a great lesson for us on how not to do branded or partnered content. Peter and I have had plenty of discussions this year about having companies sponsor or otherwise give us money for the content we’re creating.
Keep this in mind as a failed attempt at "Sponsored Content".
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