A few folks have mentioned The Passion and whether or not they’re going to go see it.
There has been a rash of spammed anonymous comments on LiveJournal recently promoting The Passion (several with malformed HTML or big images that irritate the recipients). I received one of these on February 15th from someone claiming to be “Natasha” at IP address 203.155.92.131, via 203.195.105.33 (from Dept. of Business Energy, via COMNET-TH in Bangkok– nice, overseas address, to make it virtually impossible to do anything legally). It was anonymous, and therefore screened by default. The person made no attempt to find out anything about me, assuming I like something called “taine” (a band, perhaps?) as their lead-in for their spammy message.
So far, the producers of the movie have not, to my knowledge, publicly denounced this practice. People have commented that it looks like these are just individuals, called on by their churches to evangelize this movie, but who do you think is prompting the churches to do this? And churches have specifically been asking people to target non-believers; did I receive this spam because I am an atheist?
I found this thoughtful remark on the subject by googling for “passion spam livejournal.” From the link provided there ” The idea came from a promotional video sent to churches, telling them about the movie and how to use it to spread the Gospel.” Who sent this promo video?
Geurilla marketing is not new to church groups– they call it evangelizing. The early Christians used to convert the Roman women, because they knew they were the most oppressed by Roman doctrine, while still being empowered enough to enforce change. They would therefore be the most receptive to Christ’s message while being able to do something about it. The tradition of women being the caretakers of a family’s spirituality persisted through the Middle Ages and continues even today.
If a new, non-religious movie came out glorifying the life of, say, Eminem, and people who shared only one trait with Eminem (maybe they’re all part of the same music studio) all randomly spammed people telling them to go see the movie, everybody would say “that’s bullshit– I’m going to boycott this movie because Spam is WRONG.”
Geurilla electronic marketing has been around for a while, but had its first real break-away successes with The Blair Witch Project and Survivor, both of which were promoted seemingly independently through forums and websites, even websites that were supposedly critical of the products.
And marketers know what they are doing. I personally know a marketer who signs up for Yahoo! services, joins adult-oriented Y! groups and posts seemingly-independent comments about his own website (and much more subtly than “Hi, I’m Tina– here’s my webcam. See you soon!”). He’ll do this with several different Yahoo! accounts and in dozens of groups. He himself draws the line at having these different personae chatter at each other about the site he wants his audience to visit, but he knows others who do not stop at that line at all.
My position on spam is not new. I boycott ANY business or product that sends unsolicited email, and that includes inappropriate spams to electronic groups and forums I’m on– ESPECIALLY WHEN IT’S MY OWN JOURNAL. But I urge everyone to boycott spammers, and to deprive the companies that would profit from them from any benefit from their illegal, illicit, and immoral actions.
Boycott The Passion until Mel Gibson denounces these spammers!
Other links from google:
http://www.hiphopmusic.com/archives/000425.html
http://www.blogrunner.com/snapshot/S/4/0/00219204.html
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2003/11/9/200218.shtml (towards the end of the page: the author is vehemently intolerant of anyone who doesn’t agree with his religious views.)