'Tryvertising'

Leading on from my post about the Pay per Blog scheme and it got me thinking about the lengths advertisers are going to because of the state of the consumer market. Advertising has been sneaky in order to infiltrate the market. Agencies such as Taxi Promotion UK use civilian's to spread their word, giving them the chance to try something out first then promote it to others. They take cabbies on free holidays to Las Vegas and Thailand in the hope they will talk to their passengers about it.
Scottish and Newcastle the brewer that brews Kronenbourg and Fosters, are currently going into 6,000 pubs across England to buy customers free drinks whilst asking about their drinking habits.
Another amusing bit of advertising took place a couple of months ago in Covent Garden, London. The company Carbon Marketing deliberately jackknifed a lorry spilling thousands of boxes of Nestle(their clients)chocolate bars onto the street. Up to 70,000 passers by picked up a chocolate bar to sample not even knowing that they were taking part in a 'free trial'. This so called 'Tryvertising' works particularly well with children willing to put up with adverts bombarding them in return for free stuff. It certainly works for the company Blyk a new mobile phone company who offers teenagers free text messages in return for being regularly interrupted by adverts. Teenagers are only too happy to accept this.
The fact that it shows consumers are willing to put up with being advertised to, and also promoting to others, in return for freebies shows that 'Tryvertising' may be the new thing in a world where we really don't want to be told what to do and buy. Conventional advertising isn't enough nowadays.