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Comment by nicholassmith | Hacker News Reader

There's a plot point in Zero History by William Gibson where one of the characters does viral marketing by engaging people in conversation in bars and promoting various things, I always thought it was reasonably neat because we tend to pick things up organically like that.

Fascinating to see that companies were actually trying approaches like that in the days where hearing about the hot new tech very much came from conversations with other engineers, rather than the wealth of places we have now for hearing about the latest & (potentially) greatest.

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My favorite version of this was “ Find the Mystery Cougher” by Ricola. This was like… 2005? Basically they had a contest where they announced they’d be sending someone to various cities, walking around and coughing. If you offered the mystery cougher a Ricola, you’d win the contest and get a million dollars or whatever.

It’s like inverse astroturfing, and also arguably incentivizes friendly social behaviors. Genius.

Man. Talk about a pre-pandemic strategy!

"Viral marketing" has a whole different feeling now...

I'm not sure how often this happens post-2008, but before that I knew several people (most would describe them as "beautiful young women") who were paid to go to busy bars and order a particular brand of alcohol. Or to encourage other people to buy those drinks for them, I guess. It seemed like a waste of money to me until I realized that I'd started ordering Jack Daniel's Honey liqueur because they'd installed one of those machines with the upside-down whiskey bottles at a bar I was in, and it sounded interesting.

So people are pretty susceptible to steering on things like alcohol preference, and it doesn't seem to take much to steer us.

https://youtu.be/Q0GjxhQewug

OMG I hadn't seen that ill have to share that with my co workers :-)

My understanding is that bars in Vegas do this with “atmosphere models” who are payed to fill out bars and encourage people to order more drinks in general. I heard about it in this podcast: nodumbquestions.fm/listen/2021/5/20/109-what-happens-in-vegas

starting at 37:00 with context and about 39:50 when he gets into atmosphere modeling. This guy started working in the back of a bar for a few days a week and part of the deal was he would spend some nights sitting in a related bar. He also goes into a lot of other interesting stuff that happens in Vegas which I don’t remember off the top of my head.

In fact, the PR firm for the makers of a vodka brand did hire someone to order <insert brand> Vodka with a loud voice in various places when exporting it to the USA began, according to Carl Hamilton's book about the design of the bottle.

The practice is known as astroturfing, for the artificial grass. Okdo seems to do alot of it for Raspberry Pi. At this point I'm more or less expecting to see articles and videos on having Raspberry Pi take out the trash. If it could be done with any microcontroller or SBC, but it is pushed, the headline always includes the brand.

edit: typo

FWIW, I don’t know if I’ve read too much Gibson or not Enlight marketing textbooks, but <insert brand> Vodka would be visually attractive to me on a bottle label.

I had the idea of going out and flirting with guys directly, then giving them your onlyfans as your contact. I imagine this would effectively be a money printer.

I'm surprised onlyfans women don't do this routinely. If you were an even marginally attractive women, and you could hold a decent conversation for 20 minutes, I probably would be stuck ponying up $10 to see you naked. Even knowing that I got played.

You gotta think about conversion rates and expected value. If flirting with a guy for twenty minutes gives you an 80% conversion rate, it might work if they go for the higher tiers. If it gives you a 1% conversion rate, that's a lot of work for not a lot. An hour of conversation with three people for $10-$15? You may as well go get an actual hourly job. For $0.45? No.

You also have to know that word will get around pretty quickly. People do not like being misled like that and will compare notes and bars do not like being parasitized this way. Instead the spammers (and these people are spammers!) go for dating apps and Instagram to spread their links.

Remember, Onlyfans is a power law thing. Only a small percentage do well. The rest are struggling and dumping lots of work into something that only brings in a few bucks. It's pretty far from printing money for most.

The efficient way to do it is to go to clubs or parties, chat with a bunch of guys, get numbers or social medias, and then later text them links to your OnlyFans page.

Girls can easily clean up and grab about 20-30 guys a night like this.

Later you can try to go after the whales by going on 1 on 1 dates and making them special offers for higher tier content.

Email everybody from your highschool. 90% conversion, I bet.

"higher tier content" is one way of describing the world's oldest profession

That's a lot like what Blackberry used to do:

https://www.nydailynews.com/life-style/stealth-marketing-pit...

I'd laugh in their face if they ended a little flirtation with a link to their only fans page. I'm waiting on good ol' Musky to spam my waking hours with thought intrusive advertising, not your average bar goer.

The risk of becoming a crime victim is rather high here.

This is ridiculous, just make a Tinder account and get 100x the eyes with a tenth of the effort.

nitpick: the plot point with Voytek's sister doing viral marketing is in Pattern Recognition (the first in the trilogy, Zero History is the third)

I suspected I was wrong but I didn't have my copies to hand, thank you for catching it!

This actually happened in some places.

In Chicago, there were ad agencies who would hire actors to engage in "spontaneous" conversations on the subway about various products. I read a couple of articles about it in the newspaper at the time.

This was around 2005ish. It's interesting to think back to that era. I wonder if a book or movie will ever capture the energy, optimism, and audacity of a time when everything seemed possible, urban startups were awash in cheap cash, and there were so many young people full of vim, ready to reinvent the world.

> This was around 2005ish. It's interesting to think back to that era. I wonder if a book or movie will ever capture the energy, optimism, and audacity of a time when everything seemed possible, urban startups were awash in cheap cash, and there were so many young people full of vim, ready to reinvent the world.

I think it's sad that you don't thing there are many young people out there today, full of vim, ready to reinvent the world. They are always there, the next generation.

They will have lived through a Great Recession and a pandemic, they know that climate change is real and must be avoided. The opportunities are endless and it's only older people that are holding them back.

> they know that climate change is real and must be avoided.

Uh, we knew that in 2005 already, quite a lot of educational projects following the Kyoto protocols !

They are always there, the next generation.

They exist, but it's not the same. Not in the same numbers. You're right that a bunch of it is economy-driven, but every generation goes through hard times. Millennials (I assume you reference Millennials) like to moan a lot, but they had it easier than a lot of people before them. Millennials have never known food rationing, mass migrations because of natural disasters, gas shortages, a real war, or many other things that older Americans have.

They will have lived through a Great Recession and a pandemic

They weren't the first. They won't be the last.

they know that climate change is real

I'll give you that one.

it's only older people that are holding them back.

That's simple ageism. The "older" people created all the things you take for granted: computers, space travel, cell phones, satellites, jet travel. You're standing on the shoulders of giants.

A friend of mine did something similar in San Francisco, in the 90s. She was paid to go to expensive bars, look fabulous and have a good time drinking Hennessey Martinis, occasionally mentioning the booze and buying drinks.

She had a great time doing it.

These days we call it 'Instagramming'.

I believe they called her a 'coolhunter' in that book. Which I was, at my age, surprised to learn was even a term once. But that sort of guerrilla marketing does seem very effective.

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