Reading, out of curiosity, the comments thread on the post by Ms Fits LP linked to yesterday, I came across this comment:
Dave Zero said…
Hi ‘Ms Fits’.
I reckon these days everyone’s far too worried about responsibility in general. Me and my mates have been reading about this great thing called “The Zero Movement” and now realise that what we really need is zero responsibility.
We’ve been inspired to put together a bit of a site about it, so if you want to read more then head over to thezeromovementrocks.blogspot.com.
Now, if I’m not wrong, that’s spam for Coke. But not the usual spam with either nonsense words in it, repeated links, or crud like “I like your site. I really like your opinions. Please check out this link for penis-extending drugs”. In other words, not posted by a bot, but a person (a needy student of marketing?) who’s paid to identify prominent blogs and come up with some sort of pretext for mentioning a brand. How ethical is this? Is it any different to classical spamming?
If indeed, this is spam, it comes with a disclaimer:
PPS. And before anyone asks – no, we’re not affiliated with the Coca-Cola company or anything like that. We love the new Coke zero, but we’re definitely NOT on their payroll. We’re just a couple of regular blokes who are really into the zero movement philosophy. Are you?
No.
And if you read the financial pages, no one’s buying the stupid drink. What’s the point of Coke without sugar? I mean, really? Just two dudes called “Zero” who are so into a non-existent movement that totally mirrors Coke’s marketing campaign that they want to set up a blog to communicate a “message” that’s nothing to do with the real thing?
Update: Armaniac takes on Coke spammers! And so does MrLefty!
kim, i got the same message in my comments on a post regarding the zero movement, and so i am currently writing a post that debunks the pseudo-philosophy of the ad campaign in case there are some monkies who actually believe that tripe.
“regular blokes” what is that? ffs… what have they been bashing lebs at the big day out wrapped in an australian flag and drinking VB while masturbating with a lamb chop and talking about last night’s footy in the back of a Holden ute with three of their mates?
making a fake blog that was obviously coke sponsored was simple corporate stupidity, sure we can forgive them because that are infected by the disease of capitalism. but trying to do it again by passing it off as non-sponsored blog is the most retarded thing I have ever read in the blogosphere. Actually, sorry, it probably is non-sponsored because coke has stopped paying the fools who are running the campaign. i think the copywriters who wrote the new blog should read a few other blogs to get a feel of what an actual blog feels like to write/read. where are the speling mistakes? the grammar shithouse ? the silly rants about silly things written by silly people? and, most importantly, the connection of one’s silly litle life with grand machinations beyond it? most blog posts take you for a ride on an exitential rollercoaster that weaves its way inwards to the depths of one’s superficial preoccupations and then outwards to the horror of contemporary everyday life.
the ad company behind this shit would have to consist of the stupidest bunch of private school old boys that ever did BA topped-up with business masters… Good one!
plus coke zero really is disgusting! lol!!!!!
And, glen, like, how totally lame is it to say that something “rocks”? So last millennium
In other words, I agree – they can’t even spoof either a blog or yoof-speak.
There’s a post on BoingBoing about PR companies hiring people to set up fake personas on web forums and then using them to promote products. The people who promote zero may not be on Coke’s payroll, but on the PR companies’.
Take a closer look at that site. Maybe there’s some culture jamming going on here.
Does anyone remember OK Soda?
From the blog:
“Nick was a bit down because his olds had been giving him a hard time”
Do young people really still say ‘olds’ these days referring to their parents?
and no typos, good punctuation, they could have tried harder really
Odd that there are no comments over there, eh?
I put this one –
“Oh for god sake. Just how stupid do these companies think we are?
ps try going to work for Coke and making employment demands as per the “zero movement philosophy”. Yeah, I’m sure they’ll be very understanding.”
What’s the bet they’ll just delete it?
Kim (this is a cross post after i cocked it up DAMN FURY!),
Thats a very good point you make there. I like your comments. My friends and I make commenst all time at my Coke /starbucks/Microsoft/.mcDonalds blog every day- you should check it out http://thomasr.blogspot.com
Kidding of course. I see the “real person� spam blogs as being inevitable- and I’m going to say it- rather cutting edge. But in the context of LP I find it a waste of readers time and eyes. Delete them immediately- it’s like tagging graffitti- remove it so they get no time in the sun.
I see a time when blogger and other blog sites providing options beyond the standard “type the letters you see above� anti spam measures with a “tick this box if this is unrelated spam nonsense� and the people are then empowered to delete this “cuttting edge� advertising crap.
But in the meantime- lets just enjoy cutting through the crap they post- whats next?
thomasr
It’s complete shite from top to bottom. Hopefully Fits will culture jam a bottle of the foul stuff up the fool’s backside.
The only faintly interesting thing about this afaic is that it amply demonstrates how vulnerable culture jamming actually is to recuperation. Although my impression is that this particular effort has roundly backfired.
I laughed grimly that Glen mentioned leb-bashing etc in this context – comicstriphero had an excellent post a few days ago about the disturbing similarities…
http://comicstriphero.blogspot.com/2006/01/ground-zero.html
and for anyone who’s still interested, I recommend this wide-awake post from someone who is even more shitted off about this idiocy than me. http://invisiblegovernment.net/n/blog/zero_dollars_yet_movement.html
Ooh – Mr Lefty, Jase Zero just replied to your comment!
Thanks for posting this Kim. I’m wondering if Coca-Cola have any frigging idea what kind of can of worms they’ve opened. Jeez. Rule#1 for dealing with New World Media:
Do Not Get Bloggers Pissed Off At You.
‘”Joining the zero movement is about saying “Enough! Why the hell CAN’T we have a great life without any of the bad stuff?” I reckon it’s a really novel concept.”‘
Uh, that’s NOT a philosophy guys… that’s just wishful thinking.
thomasr, I’ll remove the duplicate post you inadvertently put up on the other thread.
“Enough! Why the hell CAN’T we have a great life without any of the bad stuff?�
Okay… I’ll be fair. The problem of suffering is an important question for philosophy and theology. Not sure if Coke are approaching it rigorously though…
Unbelievable.
And I actually like(D) the stuff.
Why don’t we make it backfire, start a blog campaign against them?
I’ll link this post, maybe others should do the same, refer to coke and zero in the heading to try diverting googles…
I googled coke zero this morning (google.au) and the pages of mockery took me back to the merry days of the Nige54 fiasco…they don’t need too much help shooting themselves in the foot, methinks
Hey I found enlightenment in a can of sugar-free cancer water with some edgy “observations” that aren’t banal at all! Coke Zero helped my pony tail grow, too!
who wants to go sand boarding?
Paid to sit around all day reading people’s blogs, leaving nonsensical annoying comments. Hmmm.
Where do I sign up?
“The zero movement is about living life your way, a life free of limits and consequences.”
Gnostic antinomianism!!! Heresy!!! Coke must burn!
On reflection I think Don Arthur is right and this is a bit of reverse psychology-type comedy. Bloody funny though. And damn well done.
Gosh, they’ve suddenly got a whole lot of mysterious aussie-sounding blokes talking about how nice other drinks are. I wonder why?
Geez, if they knew how good a meat pie and a beer was… they just don’t know what they’re missing, I reckon.
I saw the same comment, and was going to post about it, but I figure as far as they are concerned any publicity is good publicity, so ignoring them entirely is a better policy.
Up all night without drinking sugar?
Loving the comments threads over at zero central.
Yikes – I think blogspot just went down.
Scheduled outage, Mr B. Set to go out at 7 pm pacific standard time, no word on how long. Blessed be the feed reader!
Zoe – but I only had half and hour of zero time programmed before I have to do some work in which I hoped to rap with Dave and Jase!
Damn corporations!
Don’t come crying to me, I’ve got a three year old who’s going to wake up in an hour!
Perhaps Dave and Jase have some zerinspiration on child rearing? Must ask.
Or they could ask Sal (the cute housemate). Those boys, are like totally, blokey.
blogger outage OUTRAGE!
Cute housemate? – tick.
Girlfriend ? – embarrased looks and foot shuffling.
Laura, I KNOW!
And what’s worse, my pathetic dial-up’s been hiding the word verification image so I haven’t been able to wish you well for your blog birthday.
This is from Crikey a couple of weeks ago:
Sounds like zero results, to me…
kim – a small while back I pointed out to the LP Politburo a spam comment from a King Kong new movie blog site appended to, I think, a movie post here.
I think Mark might have removed it, but I’m sure it was a marketting blog for King Kong. I thought it might have been an automated comment bot but it may have been human
Remember Cherry Coke and Vanilla Coke? Big zeros!
Francis, yeah, I remember that. I suspect it wasn’t a bot because it didn’t get caught by the Spaminator which is designed to pick up the characteristics of typical bot spam. But it was spam, so I trashed it.
Oh, and I followed the link and it was definitely a faux blog set up to promote the King Kong movie.
I in regards to thezeromovementrocks … u guys ever heard of irony??
“I in regards to thezeromovementrocks … u guys ever heard of irony??”
Yeah, it’s like goldy or silvery, except made out of iron, right?
Let’s face it, no one who calls themselves Jase is ever gonna be any kinda of an ironymaster.
Look nads, since you guys obviously don’t have a real clue about the wonderful world of blogging, let me kick your education off by introducing you to the term “sockpuppet”. Go, google it. What? Oh yes, well “google it” means going to a website called http://www.google.com where you can search for links to words or phrases. Pretty amazing, hey! Whatever will they think of next?
Everywhere relevant, and some not, I have been saying for some time that political parties will be doing this same dopey thing in the next election runup.
Hopefully, this Coke crap will warn them that
BLOGS Are The Only REAL Real Thing and cannot be faked convincingly.
Nabs, your link was broke. Did you mean this one?
If, like, Coke proves to be connected to the site then they’ve, y’know, got some gnarly stuff to explain. Like why there’s a post where the guy calls his ex a slut on there (along with a call for negative duders to lay off, like, the downer comments).
I’ve saved it in case they delete.
Zoe,
I think Nabs might have had this in mind. Or possibly this.
NB: as these Wikipedia entries are not on scientific topics, they should not be assumd to be either authoritative or accurate. Neither should the scientific ones, but that’s another story.
“I’ve saved it in case they delete.”
Cool. This is shaping up as a classic object lesson in campaign backfire, to be taught in copywriting and marketing classes for years to come.
My first impression of this was to think “piss-take”. Though, looking at the similarity between this blog and the original “zero-movement” blog it’s hard to know. Seems like if this is a joke it’s gone on a little long doesn’t it?
Whatever, either way I’m totally with the movement. Life should have like, zero hassles man.
Does anyone know how this stuff tastes with Bundy? Now that should be a topic that they should post about on that blog.
Oh, and don’t diss vanilla Coke! I actually like that stuff.
Friggin’ hilarious.
You were right first time, Mick.
Bundy Zero (100% shitfaced – zero hangover) – now there’s an idea!
Coke should have learnt from the complete failure of Duff Zero in the “Homer becomes a roaring 20’s bootlegger” simpsons episode. Or they should at least double the caffeine to make up for the lost sugar hit.
Let alone the fact that sugar is no doubt much healthier than whatever chemical they’re using as a substitute.
Has anyone noticed the Pepsi Max ads that have just gone up with “ZERO sugar” in big letters?
(Disclosure: I prefer Pepsi to Coke, but won’t touch Pepsi Max or Diet Coke or Vanilla Coke or any of those variants; I thought Cherry Coke was a sad imitation of Dr Pepper, which remains the world’s best tooth-rotting drink.)
Like Robert I’m also a big fan of unhealthy sugar-free drinks. I just leave the cola out and have my whisky neat.
Obviously I’ve got my choice of spirit worked out.
If I saw someone mixing coke of any sort with an Armagnac, Cognac, or any whiskies in the class of Laphroigs (spelling?!) I would have homocidal impulses.
“f I saw someone mixing coke of any sort with an Armagnac, Cognac, or any whiskies in the class of Laphroigs (spelling?!) I would have homocidal impulses.”
And quite rightly so. Tang is a far superior mixer for a good single malt.
My advice is to worry about the INgredients not the EXgredients.
all of those drinks are poison.
and armagniac honey – homIcidal.?
Coke in whisky, urgh. That is unless it was the whisky they used to serve in the student bars I used to go to in Brisneyland, in which case it was pretty necessary.
Bundy Zero, that would be an easy sell. I remember drinking a Coke once and commenting on it tasting a bit weird, one of my mates said, “that would be the lack of rum”, he was right…