Forum Seeding

Most advertising in Hong Kong is so appallingly derivative (why do all tutorial schools display photoshopped images of their teaching staff dressed like extras from Reservoir Dogs on the backs of buses? and why, while we're at it, do all companies that produce sanitary napkins always pour blue water onto the pad – what’s wrong with green?) that, like many others, I hardly notice it.

I was, nonetheless, interested when I met up with an old friend from the advertising world at the weekend who told me about a growing trend in Hong Kong, "forum seeding". In a nutshell, this is when a company gets their staff – or pays outsiders (not preferred in Hong Kong, apparently, because it makes the operation more difficult to control) – to post under different aliases to popular internet forums and chat rooms to promote its products or services.

The latest example of this growing trend that he had come across featured a leading logistics company, which had asked its staff to make fly-by posts in a dozen popular forums, using different pseudonyms, to create "noise" (he's an okay bloke, but he can't free himself from the linguistic shackles of his trade) for its latest advertising campaign.

I'm waiting for the day (sadly, unlikely ever to come to Hong Kong where The Weakest Link failed because people here have no taste for the ironic and the humiliating) when people get hired to write trenchant "anti-advertising" copy. It worked for Guinness (in their famous "Guinness? But I don’t like Guinness!" television campaign), although I'm not sure whether the same can be said for Gerald Ratner's infamous "My products are total crap" campaign.