PressEthic

Since advertisers can’t figure out how to brainwash the new generation of free-thinking consumers, they’ve come up with a new tactic. An article from today’s Boston Globe reports on company-hired “campus ambassadors” who approach students that they are friends with and talk up a certain product to them.

The article starts out with a scene that the author, Sarah Schweitzer, says would be “a corporate marketer’s dream.” A campus ambassador, who also happens to be cute and popular, and a senior, approaches some friends while wearing a T-shirt with a software advertisement from Microsoft on it that says, “Save Trees. Use OneNote.”(Notice the cool, subtly anti-corporate, pro-environment undertones of the tagline.) The other kids seem interested in the product, and even ask him how they can get a shirt too. Imagine that, kids wearing clothing with advertisers’ labels!

Apparently student ambassadors are a last-ditch effort to gain some ground (and street cred) with the important college student demographic that has proven to be finicky and unpredictable. According to advertising specialists, this tactic works because unlike buzz marketing and street teams, it capitalizes on an already existing network that the ambassadors have through their school. The technique is, according to the companies, “forthcoming.”

I find it hard to believe that all of those students who are pitching products would always be forthcoming about their motive. While the article notes that companies make clear that students should be up front about what they are doing, there is no way to regulate this. The companies monitor sales based on emails that have been collected, and Microsoft looks at the number of downloads from the school that a sales-student represents.

Without any way to monitor these campus representatives, there is really no way to know if they are selling the products ethically. Schweitzer points out that colleges have little control over student marketers and often don’t even know that they exist. This sounds doubtful. Sure, while the kids are hawking Microsoft programming colleges look the other way, but I bet if they were pushing cigarettes or alcohol then schools would get a lot better at identifying the ambassadors.

The problem with this article is that it makes the endeavor sound like such a successful business ploy, and I just don’t believe it. Even if it is moderately successful, I would give it a short shelf life. Unless kids on campus are getting less cynical from when I was in undergrad, I just can’t imagine anyone I know buying into this. Sure, people emulate others that they think are cool, but as soon as it's found out that they're being paid to wear a certain shirt or use a product, it all goes out the window. All of the "cool" people I remember in college were popular for their sort of anti-establishment vibe, and if people found out they were shills for a corporation, it wouldn't have gone over well. I really don’t think things are any different today.