Red Mobile Ad Backmasked: Viral or Shill?
For advertisers who still think they can control their message, here’s a reminder that such presumption is incompatible with remix culture. Someone backmasked an ad for Philippine cellular service provider Red Mobile (formerly U Mobile) and posted his handiwork to YouTube.
Depending on how you look at it, the result is either amusing or disturbing. On one hand, we find out the girl’s name is Luz. On the other hand, we see a guy yelling at a girl, pointing chopsticks at her, and then stabbing his sushi. That would make for creepy foreshadowing in a movie.
Either way, it’s free publicity for Red. Wonder if they actually posted this themselves. Given the smiling models and trendy teenspeak they employed to distract from the inadequacies of U Mobile, I wouldn’t put it past them to shill on YouTube.
That the poster’s channel has exactly one video doesn’t help allay suspicion. If Red Mobile had anything to do with posting this video, then they should properly disclose their involvement.
Update: Apparently, one guy is spamming this video all over Multiply. Multiply has three million Filipino users.
The spammer uses the same naming convention as the poster of this video: an English word combined with a Filipino word, in CamelCase. Sounds like a shill to me.
(Video via Marcelle Fabie.)
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I sounded a bit like a sleazebag, let rephrase that to something better: If it was viral, theyre actually a bit successful on that aspect. But If they’re gonna depend on shill marketing practices and eventaully start spamming, that is just shady.
Shilling is bad enough. Spamming makes it worse.
Hey guys! I just wanna say, well, it did caught your attention. I think you guys just helped it become famous. 🙂
Or infamous, depending on how you look at it. 😛
I have nothing to say but
Pathetic Spammer is Pathetic…
He’s just another attention fag. Nothing more, nothing less.
it could also be “manunu ka” (nuno sa punso) hehe :p
Anyway. The check if it wasn’t a play of our suggestive mind, professional backmaskers always let a set of songs or recorded speeches be heard by another professional backmasker. Then they also let other willing volunteers (who are not professionals) to do a set.
If they all arrived closed enough or exactly at the same “words heard” of the same song, then it is a confirmed backmask message.
I’m not a statistics expert (I already forgot it, way back high school days for me), but
1) hearing the same thing, without prior knowledge or clues, is something; and combined with
2) picking up the exact song among a set of songs, is yet another confirmation.
#2 eliminates the possibility of a tester having his mind set that “he should hear something with this song”. By mixing it with other songs, the tester doesn’t know which song “he should hear something”.
The preset knowledge that you should hear something can not be eliminated, IF someone asks you to check the song, you already know it.
There are other “checks” other than those two I mentioned.
And yes, it is creepy. It isn’t for the faint of heart or for those with very active and strong imaginations (like me).
I actually find it more funny than creepy. 😆