Sunday 12 June 2011

Daisy derivatives

I often hold up the Daisy Ad as an example of an attack ad a common form of negative marketing.

The advert used fear of the end of the world to promote the presidential campaign of Lyndon Johnson. Johnson won a landslide victory - and the advert made marketing history - for its controversial use of fear as an incentive.

You can watch the Daisy Ad here:

Religions make use of fear as a motivator by threatening helfire and damnation. Chain letters use the same trick - by threatening unspecified bad luck if you break the chain. However, the use of fear in a political marketing campaign seems rather underhand.

These days, some derivative adverts have appeared. Here we will present a few of them - and consider how they fit into the terminological framework of memetics. The first one is probably the best one.

These adverts use a kind of memetic hitchhiking on the original advert, via its title.

They exhibit memetic linkage to the original ad - in the namespace of video titles.

They use search magnet techniques to show up in searches for the original advert.

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