Scott Fisher

When describing the medium of ARGs, fans often note that the best designed experiences explicitly to blur the lines of reality. Though an undeniably powerful new medium, uniquely adapted to the multimedia context of the Web, developing ARG’s as hype-machines could also potentially prove somewhat treacherous territory for marketers, as the online consumers is increasingly sensitive to being manipulated. Blogs have, for example, proven to be an extremely effective tool at “debunking”, as was famously seen in the case of so-called Rathergate during the 2004 election, in which bloggers, exposed the documents critical of President George W. Bush's service in the United States National Guard presented in a 60 Minutes broadcast, as likely forgeries. Likewise, when operating in the viral space, marketers may have the potential of causing as much harm as they can good, such as, for example, in the case of Cillit Bang, a UK brand of cleaning product, who were forced to publicly apologize for having conducted a deceptive viral marketing campaign after members of their marketing team were exposed by bloggers for having left a series of thinly veiled advertisements on blogs in the guise of a fictional character.