in-vertising

In-vertising is a marketing strategy wherein the target audience is pressured into buying a product or service they may or may not need by the intentional insinuation that the audience member must buy the product in order to retain or boost their social standing. In-vertising is often a multi-part scheme which involves manipulation of pop media to increase the popularity of assets heralded herein to be critical to higher social function, such as a song, catch phrase or brand identification.

Some common examples of in-vertising:

Volkswagon's commercials often use obscure musical pieces, which are then pushed to radio and clubs, thereby becoming popular, having the effect that when people hear the tune they find it familiar and question "where have I heard this?" which leads back to Volkswagen's product, thus gaining market exposure for such product.

Apple uses a similar marketing tactic in which an obscure (or established) piece of music is played while the product is moved about on the screen in a pattern that draws the viewer's attention.

Such ads often employ other attention-drawing tactics such as the use of high contrast images (tagged in most of society's brain as the format for important alerts such as street signs and warning labels) and the repetition of recognizable catch phrases (ie "hi I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC").

in-vertising by Spirit Bear September 21, 2007