College Kids Earn Extra Beer Money By Annoying Friends With Sales Pitches
from the talk-about-contextual-advertising... dept
With college kids still being a very lucrative market -- but those same kids ignoring traditional media sources such as TV, radio and movies -- some firms are trying to get creative. They've combined the idea of "buzz marketing" with street teams and have more or less convinced college kids to sell out their friends. Basically, the firms in question (including Microsoft), convince some college kids that, in exchange for some free product samples, they need to wander campus and tell people how awesome their products are. Sometimes there's a small stipend involved, but it sounds like that isn't always the case. Either way, this sounds a little questionable. While the article doesn't seem to suggest there's a downside to this at all and seems to think that it must work -- I'd imagine that if any of my college buddies suddenly ran up to me to tell me why Microsoft was great, I'd be especially skeptical. It just wasn't part of your everyday conversation. And getting the cool, charismatic students to say it doesn't change much at all -- it just sounds sneaky and underhanded.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
Reader Comments
Subscribe: RSS
View by: Time | Thread
Loosers
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
How can they know?
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
No Subject Given
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Oops...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
girls give oral sex
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Beer and college kids
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Old news...
They would come, knock, and ask if I wanted magazine. I would check to see that the cost of buying through them would be more than buying directly from the vendor and share this revelation to them.
Then they would state how if I bought through them it would help them through various reasons. The most appealing was that it was to fund their college tution while the least was so that they could possibly win a trip to Cancun or Europe.
My response was usually, "so I should pay more than I have to so that YOU can go on vacation on MY dime?" At this point, they usually gave up.
These companies really need to give some sort of marketing training to these college kids if they really want to make some inroads into the college crowd.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Yup
Lately, and i guess this isnt the same thing, but people have been starting websites to promote stuff for companies. Last week NeedBeerMoney.com was written all over campus in chalk.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]