That's Repulsive, It Must Be Brilliant

I had that thought today when the fear struck me that soon we would see advertizing take the form of MSN Winks. As in:

User A downloads a free 'wink' (animated full-screen emoticon that you can send over MSN Messenger) from a site owned by coca-cola.

User A sends the (perhaps innocuous) wink to a few friends, to see what it does and to show it off.

User B gets the wink, is amused by the animation, smiles, and sees 'click here' at the end.

User B is put in a good mood by the animation and still hasn't learned his lesson about clicking things sent to you via a Microsoft product (this is the target market for such an ad campaign to begin with.) The link takes User B to coca-cola.com, or some promotion subsite.

The website sees that the reference was from User A's computer, and credits a little paypal or promotions account some nominal amount of money, or maybe a free iTunes song with 5 clicks. Or an affiliate program where if User B ends up buying something User A gets a percentage.

This system is already up and running on the web, and further decentralizing it, and adding the exploitation of trust between users on a contact list, can make ads even more targetted and effective.

Now, if you are a marketing goon in a position to implement this: Kill yourself.

I think it's funny that I come up with genius marketing ideas now and then, and I base my judgment of how good an idea it is by how completely terrified and repulsed I am that someone might actually do it.

Maybe this anti-conscience is what happened to the former consciences of marketing people. They use it as an idea barometer and misinterpreted the negative reaction as something good.
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