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The cheapest whores on campus
Back in the good old days, the only companies employing college reps were the major record labels. Apparently, nowadays, everyone's in the game. From the Boston Globe:
In an age when the college demographic is no longer easily reached via television, radio, or newspapers... a microindustry of campus marketing has emerged. Niche firms have sprung to act as recruiters of students, who then market products on campus for companies such as Microsoft, JetBlue Airways, The Cartoon Network, and Victoria's Secret...
The students selected tend to be campus leaders with large social networks that can be tapped for marketing... They are expected to devote about 10 to 15 hours a week talking up the products to friends, securing corporate sponsorship of campus events, and lobbying student newspaper reporters to mention products in articles. They also must plaster bulletin boards with posters and chalk sidewalks -- tactics known as ''guerilla marketing," which, marketing firms acknowledge, intentionally skirt the boundaries of campus rules. (emphasis added)
The companies not only get the kids to do their dirty work for them, they get them to do it for free!
Posted by Carrie McLaren on 10/26/2005 | Permalink
Comments
Those college kids who are targeted because they are the center of large social networks are not going to remain the center of those networks for long. Who wants to hang around with someone who talks about certain brands names to the exclusion of all other things. Everyone will know that this person is a corporate zombie if s/he is talking about the great frequent flier program from Jetblue instead of about getting drunk and laid. Or maybe the whole social network is to hungover from non-stop binge drinking that they don't even care what the person is talking about, but that doesn't exactly make them susceptible to the marketing message.
Posted by: Kenzi | Oct 26, 2005 1:14:51 PM
Great title for this post! It is pretty depressing that some college campuses, once the hotbed of much-needed idealistic critical thinking, are fast becoming the hotbed of even more corporate worship. Even better than these people that do corp-work for free are these asses that actually pay to wear shit emblazoned with corporate ads... and think it's great! The cause is lost; the country descends further into philistinism.
Posted by: Jim | Oct 27, 2005 7:51:34 AM
That goes on a lot at my school, but frankly the people who they 'enlist' are sly and suspicious... most of us don't want to have anything to do with them. We're not all blind. I think it's hurting these businesses instead of helping.
Either that or employing the loyalty of the extremely vulnerable (likely to not be successful in the future). Eh, I guess you don't need to be successful to buy Victoria Secret.
Posted by: Hillary | Oct 27, 2005 1:44:16 PM
i work at city college of ny, in harlem - i interact some with the students and i have *not* seen the whoredom mentioned. which makes me wonder, it's back to a class system - we're a crappy public college, ya want marketers at the pricey places of higher learning. (on that note, a recent village voice on the 'best of nyc' listed a strip club that had city college students working there)
Posted by: herb | Oct 29, 2005 10:54:20 AM
College whores. we're all whores really. What's wrong with college kids trying to make a buck? The only one pulling the trigger on a deal is you. If you've grown up here in the US, you've been marketed to since birth, or even before, so, really kids are what we call media savvy, because they're bored with TV, radio, newspaper. They like internet, because they can interact, and they love gaming. go there.
Posted by: ed | Oct 31, 2005 6:12:47 PM
In Australia, there is a firm who specialises in this field of marketing with the audacity to call themselves Student Services Australia. In a moment of desparation, I applied for a job with the company to market a certain popular line of mp3 players. I worked at a department store at the time selling similar products, so I figured it wouldn't be that disimilar. I quit the position after the training [which I wasn't paid for which is kind of illegal, though they made us all sign a contract to dodge that bullet]. Their methods were shady to say the least. They actively encouraged the use of guerilla and other more invasive means of marketing. There were also plans to award prizes based on certain performance indicators; which included how "creative" our campaigns were, and how many students we could get to sign slips that allowed said mp3 player manufacturer to spam them [which they did via the guise of a giveaway]. I could write volumes about how horrible the whole experience was for me ethically, but at least it proved a reminder to how shallow these systems can be.
Unfortunately this is no new syndrome, particularly in Australia. From the day I spent training for this position, there was definite evidence that they were targeting a certian kind of person to be the face of these campaigns. While they may have been the centre of large social networks, it appeared unlikely that these people would have spent a great deal of time talking to their peers about the products they were pushing. They just saw it as a job, and this is the problem. The problems with what they were being asked to do just didn't seem to register with many of those present. This isn't just reflective of the people fulfilling these postions, it highlights a number of issues with our culture at large. As a result of the perpetual bombardment of media at large, people are slowly losing their ability to look at things from a critical distance. What's worse is that this is being exploited, and quite often it's by organisations with enough money to make themselves unavoidable.
Posted by: Dan | Nov 5, 2005 1:15:54 AM
