(September 29, 2005) — Imagine yourself enjoying an exciting day at your favorite theme park. You would think nothing of a happy couple asking you to take their picture with their brand new picture phone. They enthusiastically detail all of the phone’s features and tell you how happy they are with it, then smile for the picture. If you then began to entertain a desire for this camera phone that made these people so happy, you would be doing exactly what they wanted. This exact scheme was used by Sony to market their Ericsson phone in 2003 when it first came out. They hired 60 actors to stay at popular tourist destinations, posing as regular tourists. They then asked other tourists to take their picture and in turning over the phone, told them as much about it as possible. This is a relatively new form of advertising that advertising agencies call “roach baiting.” A person is hired by a company to pose as a peer of the company’s target market and, seemingly motivated only by the greatness of the company’s product, tells everyone that will listen how wonderful and valuable the product is. Like the subliminal messaging of the ‘50s, this new method leaves the consumer completely unaware that they are being marketed to. Essentially, it is an attempt to generate buzz, which (hopefully) people will pass on to their friends, producing a virus-like spreading effect. It is such an attractive prospect to advertising agencies for one thing because it is a way to combat today’s youth’s growing cynicism with advertising and the media in general. Also, people tend to place much more stock in the opinions of their peers than in how the product is advertised. For example, customers on sites like Amazon.com often buy products more based on how other customers review them than on how the merits of the product are described by the company selling it. But, advertisers are rapidly realizing that they can simply hire people to pose as customers and post rave reviews about their product while arguing with any potential critics of it. Because the entire point of roach baiting is that the potential customer is unaware that they are being marketed to, it is impossible to tell if someone is genuinely infatuated with a product, or whether they have been hired to act that way. So, the possibility that Clark students have already fallen victim to it and suspected nothing is a very real one, and there is an even greater chance that it will affect us in the future.