I was surfing YouTube today and noticed that Verizon Wireless (cell phones) has created a little immitation videos of those ‘through the years’ type videos that users create and upload on to YouTube. The video is pretty neat if you are big into seeing old cell phones from the 1980’s gradually transitioned into the 2000’s phone designs.

I would find this video much more appealing if the developers had transitioned the age of the guy in relation (slowly wrinkling) in addition to just giving him a different phone and different outfit in every video frame. If you want to know what I’d like to see done differently, look at this OldeEnglish user’s video of a ‘picture everyday’ video. See, now that video made you laugh didn’t it?

Why doesn’t CitiBank go back to making amusing commercials like these instead of their new brand of lame ‘Borat-Like’ comedy with the blind folded individual discussing how you can use your Citibank credit card to earn frequent flying miles.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has just issued a staff opinion letter (PDF) that could quell marketers’ enthusiasm for “stealth marketing.” That practice, where people are paid to use or pitch products in public settings without disclosing the fact that they are being paid to do so, falls afoul of the FTC’s “Endorsement Guidelines.” The agency concludes that “the failure to disclose the relationship between the marketer and the consumer would be deceptive unless the relationship were otherwise clear from the context.”

The occasion of the opinion is a letter from Commercial Alert (PDF), a group dedicated to “protecting communities from commercialism.” Commercial Alert asked the FTC to launch a full investigation of the buzz marketing industry, claiming that “some of these companies are perpetrating large-scale deception upon consumers by deploying buzz marketers who failed to disclose that they have been enlisted to promote products.” One case in point, mentioned in the complaint, was a campaign by Sony Ericsson that had the company pay 60 models to hang out at New York tourist attractions with the T68i cell phone. The models would ask passers-by to take their pictures using the phones in an attempt to build buzz about the product.

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