Can't argue with that. It's insidiouser.

Chico, agreed, those stink, but these actions take it to the next level. These people are blatantly lying to unsuspecting individuals, whereas those posters are obviously advertisements. Advertisements completely suck all over the place, but most people respond with some sort of mental filter. How can you filter out something that is a total lie?

It's like those liquor or music or movie posters that appear overnight on construction site walls, old buildings, etc. They're supposed to look all "street" and ad hoc but they're tactically built into media plan budgets as "wild postings". A bunch of retards and ex-taggers get paid to drive around and put 'em up. Synthetic buzz.

The New York Times ran a story about this about a year ago: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/magazine/15PHENOMENON.html

They got a quote from the FTC: "If testimonial is affiliated with you in some way, you have to disclose that," but wouldn't say if the practice was being investigated.

This is just immoral, taking advantage of people's good nature to yank them into a marketing scheme. Hire actors to play around with it publicly, fine. Give free demonstrations, good. But hiring people to pretend to need help is like paying people to cry wolf. The result will be a society with more distrust and bigger walls between strangers--what a rotten harvest!

Looks like damn cool phone to me. The only real problem I see here is that they're admitting to the technique in advance.

further blurring the line between information and dung

Was on a Southwest (?) flight cross-country once when a Phone rep made her way down the aisle asking up if we wnated to make free calls to 'discover how easy seat-back phones were.'

Didn't have the heart to tell her that is wasn't a lack of knowledge that was stopping me from making calls but the price.

This FotoFone sounds cool but if the price is too high and the images / transfer speeds lousy than all the showing it to me ain't gonna make me buy one. (I may covet the Treo but at 400$ it's not in my immediate future.)

They approach me and I'm snatchin' that mofo.