When dishonesty is the accepted behaviour in marketing, why will consumers ever trust us?

An article in the Sydney Morning Herald last weekend has exposed even more evidence about one of the chronic and growing problems in the marketing industry – dishonesty.

The story alleges a former Marketing Manager of a dating app called Down, has admitted the company hired contractors at “Russian Review Farms” to write fake positive reviews on Apple and Google app stores. And Down hired women to hold bogus conversations with unsuspecting users. Part of the marketing budget was allocated to pay the Russian Review Farms. Down even paid to have negative reviews posted about competitors.

The article also confirmed this type of behaviour is increasingly common in online businesses.

Think about that for a minute.

Marketing departments paying for lies to boost their brand is increasingly common. Why is the digital marketing industry so full of dishonest cyber-hustlers who border on criminal behaviour? Why has the digital marketing industry dragged the reputation of marketing into the mud? What is it about digital marketing that it attracts so many cyber-hustlers with a mantra of “anything goes as long as we don't get caught?"

And it appears the behaviour has infiltrated the whole digital marketing world

One of my uni students was excited to get her first job as social media manager with an online fashion brand. That was until she discovered her role. She was required to post at least 60 fake positive reviews a day using a range of fake names across various review sites. That’s it. Her manager couldn’t see what was wrong with doing this as “everyone does it”. Suffice it to say, the student didn’t stay long in the role because strangely folks, she had ethics.

Every year I buy a few courses to benchmark myself and compare what others are teaching in the same space as me. Last year I bought an annual subscription to a series of digital marketing courses from a company based in Melbourne. Turns out they were a poor investment, but here’s what I discovered.

The Founder of the company supplying the courses admitted the way he built the company’s following was through a pod of con-artists. The pod is run via a WhatsApp group that notifies each member when other members post something on social media. Then they all immediately go to the post and like, comment and share it – rinse and repeat - so they can fool the algorithm that the post is popular. The algorithm then gives the post more organic exposure. Pods are an accepted form of behaviour among many digital marketers.

He also revealed the secret to growing an Instagram following is to create a series of fake fan accounts and direct followers to your main account. For example, let’s say you sell glass drink bottles. Create an account that shows how to make fruit juices, all displayed in your drink bottle. Create another with vegetable juices all displayed in your drink bottle and so on. It all helps scam the algorithm and the punters, about your alleged popularity.

The course should have just been called “How to fake it til you make it” as it is a more apt description. Fooling the algorithm is now an essential and required marketing skill and it’s taught in numerous digital marketing courses, without any guilt.

If you haven’t yet watched Bob Hoffman in the first episode of The BIG Marketing Show (link in comments) I recommend you do. You’ll discover how bad the fraud is in programmatic advertising – it’s estimated to be about $140 Billion globally this year. It’s another industry situation where practitioners are happy to accept dishonesty rather than fix the problem.

And don’t get me started on the “How to get rich quick with disruptive fabulicious generative AI prompts” crowd.

It’s almost 30 years since I ran my first online marketing seminar about the information superhighway. The mood for the future was one of excitement about what was possible. Nobody could have predicted how low the industry standards would drop as a result of a new generation of so-called ‘marketers’.

In any trust barometer that ranks industries, the advertising and marketing industries sit at or near the bottom. Consumers don’t have a lot of faith in us – and given what is now accepted as industry standard, it’s easy to see why.

But I do live in hope, so if you could all just like, comment and share this article, I’d really appreciate it, thank you…

#cyberhustlers #programmaticfraud #digitalmarketing