'NYT Mag': Secret BzzAgent Men (and Women)
This weekend's New York Times Magazine features a cover story by consumer culture deep thinker Rob Walker called 'The Hidden (in Plain Sight) Persuaders' all about the next wave of word-of-mouth marketing coming soon to a party or family function near you.
According to Walker, soulless flakazoids (um, we mean "academically-oriented psychodemographers") at companies like the annoyingly named BzzAgent [sic.] are using your chatty friends to help promote useless products directly to you in seemingly innocuous one-on-one conversations about sausages, books, and cosmetics. (Now we know why our best friend keeps talking about goddamn sausages all the time.)
The best part? Your pal who's manipulating you on behalf of these marketers and their high-paying clients isn't even getting paid! They're just doing it because it feels good to be at the center of the "buzz" around new products, and maybe there're a couple of coupons for free crap lying around for them.
Take the example of one of BzzAgent's dutiful little lambs, Brooklyn's Karen Bollaert (above, left) who took promoting an anti-eye puffing product called No Puffery so much to heart, she didn't let a little thing like a family tragedy stop her from flaking:
At her grandfather's wake, ''a relative told me how well I was looking,'' she wrote in one report back to the BzzAgent hive, ''and I mentioned that No Puffery helped to keep me looking calm instead of puffy-eyed and as horrible as I felt.''
So sweet. (And it's not just anti-puff cosmetics that get the BzzAgent treatment: Meghan Daum's puffy novel The Quality of Life Report also gets name checked in the piece as a BzzAgent project.)
Guileless suckers promoting products just to feel ahead of the curve? Isn't that a blogger's job?
Related: Since we're writing about chumps doing free plugs, we were gonna direct you to sign up for Rob Walker's excellent (if sporadic) "Journal of Murketing" [sic.] e-newsletter, but it appears Mr. W has closed the subscription list. Hooray! We're ahead of the curve once again! The Bzz goes on...
