Buying Your Way to Good Reviews

It's nothing new really...showering people with gifts in the hopes that they'll mention you...but for mainstream journalists, it's a practice that's considered taboo. With journalists being bound to stringent ethics guidelines on what they can and cannot accept, television and film studio's are turning their attention to a new group of writers that aren't bound by such constraints. Bloggers.

Those of us in the marketing industry have long tried to convince businesses that going direct to the consumer (via blogs) is a great, low-cost way to get their products in front of eyeballs. Bloggers are always looking for things to write about and product reviews can be a great, targeted way to reach their often loyal readers.

While I occasionally write product reviews here at Search Engine Guide, it's The Lactivist, my "mommy blog" that draws interest from marketing departments. Usually that means that someone sends me a $25-$50 product that I play with for a bit and write a detailed review of, but every now and then I receive a product worth a few hundred dollars. Sure, it's nice, but does it impact my review? I'd like to think not, in fact, I'm pretty hard on products. In other words, go ahead and send me wonderful gifts, it likely will make me write about you...but what I write will depend on who you are and what you do, not on what you send me.

From the sounds of things in a Wall Street Journal article today, it doesn't always work that way.

The article goes on to share a bit of what happened after the visit.

Sounds a lot more like buying love than earning it, doesn't it?

Now to Ms. Marie's credit, she probably was simply playing the part of polite and well-intentioned blogger rather than the part of corporate shill...but with quotes like that being released you've got to wonder. How "real" were the sentiments expressed on her blog about the show? (I say that having watched "New Adventures" once or twice and finding it mind-numbingly boring.)

Of course Marie and Warner Brothers aren't the only one playing this game. Nor should they be. The race to invite bloggers to special outings or to send free products or discounts is on in all areas of marketing. I've suggested the idea to companies myself, because it works.

But I do wonder if we're running the risk of creating a whole new group of discredited writers. It's true that bloggers have far more leeway in what they can accept and how it appears to color their writing, but how many times can blog readers see "I got X trip and boy is their product just the absolute greatest" before you start to wonder how much you should trust that writing?