Clever advertising, or unethical marketing?

AdAge has some videos of recent ads including a really cute one for UPS, in which a UPS truck zips down a NASCAR track. Apparently, the agency got a team of hot-rodders to build a custom UPS truck that really goes 150 MPH. Or at least, that’s what the supplemental online-only video sugests. Could just be clever fictionalization. At any rate, straightforward, fun advertising and cross-branding.

In contrast, read this story of how Kit-Kat chocolates became popular in Japan. It begins with the name sounding something like an expression meaning, roughly, “I hope you succeed!” But because young people (in Japan and elsewhere) don’t tend to pay much attention to advertising, they went the long way around. They started by targeting students at exam-time, giving the candies away as good-luck gifts, then getting human-interest stories about the giveaways into the news. The news stories, followed by a soft-launch ad campaign, seeded what eventually became a legitimate trend. Now giving someone a Kit-Kat bar is an expression of wishing them well, and no child’s exam-day lunch is complete without the candy.

The original poster seems pretty impressed with the patience and cleverness of the marketing firm. So was I. But a commenter points out that it’s also ethically murky: “This is an example of everything that is wrong with the infotainment industry today… Japanese youth are suspicious and scornful of advertising? Then let’s corrupt news stories, hotel experiences, and family traditions.”

Ethics and marketing don’t always go hand-in-hand, especially when you try to create a grassroots phenomenon. Some would argue that the very idea of manipulating culture for commercial gain is abhorrent, but I’m not entirely opposed to it. Nor do I take the opposite viewpoint, that all culture is inherently artificial and created to benefit one group or another, so it’s totally acceptable to treat it as just another manufactured product.

Still, culture seems to be bound for manipulation, and if that’s going to happen, I’d like to be the one shaping culture for my own ends — one of those captains of consciousness you hear about in your fancy college media studies classes — rather than a passive absorber.