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Well, they’ve done it again. And they got caught – again. When are they gonna learn?

Big business has been producing phony blog sites in promotion of a consumer product – only to be exposed, as both meretricious (of course) but also stupid. The whole maneuver wins no friends – indeed alienates potential buyers in this increasing web-savvy universe.

The latest clumsy fraudster to be exposed is Sony, trying to sell its hand-held game console, PSP, through a site called Alliwantforxmasisapsp, which went live at the end of last month.

But the blog was so obviously fake that visitors immediately voiced suspicions. And finally this week (Wed Dec 13^th) Sony released a statement acknowledging the deception. “Sony Computer Entertainment America developed alliwantforxmasisapsp.com as a humorous site targeting those interested in getting a PSP system this holiday season,” it read. “We’ve now added a posting that provides this clarification to consumers visiting the site.” The company did not comment further.

It wasn’t even handled very well as a trick. The marketing agency that created the site, Zipatoni, first registered the domain name under its own name. Don’t such marketers know that this information is so very easily trackable?

What’s more, the content was all-too-obviously not consumer-generated. One post dated Nov. 22 read, “stick this ad in your girl’s vogue cosmo people who live real simple or your dad’s national maxim geographic sports for men, whoever. They’ll get the point.”

Smells a lot like Madison Avenue to me – not like teen spirit.

The ad accompanying that post showed a downloadable picture of a PSP located amid text that claimed: “This is not an ad,” and “It’s a reminder that… someone close to you wants a PSP for Xmas.”

Since the effort was neither smart nor funny nor edgy, it’s hard to imagine how any genuine bloggers would encourage their readers to print and hide the message in friends’ and families’ print magazines (not such a great or subtle selling technique, anyway, I would have thought).

Plenty of people agreed, and judged the whole effort as simply an insult to their intelligence. The blog’s comments are now shuttered. Sony’s irate consumers, however, aren’t easily silenced.

One enterprising YouTube user, “Babylonian,” created and uploaded a 50-second video montage of the offending blog’s pages. “This is a video response chronicling all the obvious evidence against alliwantforxmasisapsp.com,” Babylonian wrote. The clip, prefaced with the caption, “Sony’s failed attempt at viral marketing,” ends with the commentary, “Sorry, Sony. We’re not that stupid.”

Of course, Sony is only the latest company to be caught trying to pass off corporate phonies as “real people” in peer-to-peer communication. The Japanese-owned giant was preceded by WalMart, to name but one. The retail giant’s effort in October involved its PR agency, Edelman, in creating a fake travel blog called “Wal-Marting Across America”.

Edelman holds a seat on the board of Word of Mouth Marketing Association, which tries to uphold ethics in this murky business. After the subterfuge was exposed by Business Week magazine, the association urged Edelman to review its blogging strategy.

By the way – I like the nickname such sites have gained: “flogs” (a contraction of “fake” and “blog”). In London’s cockney slang, probably originating among street-vendors, “flogging” simply means “selling”, but with a frequent overtone of “selling over-aggressively”. It’s a usage that likely derives from the notion of “flogging a dead horse”. Big corporations’ marketing departments should take note of this etymology.

It may seem odd to turn to someone who works for General Motors to learn anything about communicating with the great American public. Hasn’t their inability to persuade Americans to buy GM cars resulted in one of the most alarming prospects to loom before Wall Street – bankruptcy among the Big Three Detroit manufactures?

That may be so, but I believe there’s power to be derived from experience, and many at GM have been educated by their scary times. At a recent (Dec 7^th) conference in New York organized by the merchant bankers Cowen and Company, Curt Hecht, made observations that contrived to combine humility with confidence –and I think his observations are worth taking very seriously. Hecht is chief digital officer at GM Planworks, dedicated media unit for General Motors products at the advertising and marketing agency Starcom MediaVest Group.

He addressed one of my favorite hobby-horses, video advertising on the net. In a panel on advertising trends he predicted the imminent demise – thank God – on one feature of the genre that is especially irksome – the 30-secong –pre-roll ad.

Consumer acceptance of pre-roll ads is “completely undetermined,” said Hecht, at a panel on advertising trends of the Fortune 500 at a Cowen and Company Internet conference. “I don’t think we know yet what the consumer wants.”

Forcing Internet users to watch a repurposed 30-second TV ad before a one-minute clip doesn’t make much sense, he said. He suggested that post-roll ads could ultimately become a more successful model than pre-rolls because they are less intrusive and catch consumers right before they go on to another activity, online or offline.

While the guaranteed impressions delivered by pre-roll ads appeal to marketers, they won’t amount to much if they end up alienating viewers. “If it’s not driving engagement, then the value proposition on pre-roll will be challenged,” said Hecht.

Online video advertising has sparked great interest among marketers and publishers because of its promise of high CPMs and better branding than banners. The category is forecast to grow by 71% this year to $225 million by market research firm eMarketer.

Dan Goodman, senior partner and executive director at Ogilvy Interactive, defended online video ads in the context of full-length TV shows streamed on network broadband sites such as CBS Innertube and NBC Rewind.

But the audience for online TV is still very small; to date, short clips have gained more traction with Web users. Goodman himself said he only turns to the Web to for video-on-demand when his TiVo goes down.

In comments following the panel, Hecht said online video might borrow a page from PBS, where programs are preceded by brief sponsorship acknowledgements. “I really think that as a core model, having a lighter introduction and then something more substantial at the end makes more sense,” he said.

Hecht noted that GM has experimented with a variety of Internet video ad formats from five-second pre-rolls to video marketing sites such as Living.com, which featured rich media and GM product integration. But he said more market research is needed to figure out what format is most effective. “We’re interested in seeing where the model is going to go,” he said.

GM’s overall ad spend during the first nine months of 2006 is $1.75 billion, according to TNS Media Intelligence.

The mass media went their usual degree of retail-crazy this year around Thanksgiving, and the trade jargon phrase of “Black Friday” gained a lot of general currency.

Previously uninformed readers and viewers (if there were any left) had the “black” part explained to them as meaning nothing dark or bad, but representing the day after Thanksgiving when retailers accounts might move from negative red to positive black ink. And the unambiguous “Cyber Monday” tag was also circulated as the new (sort-of) name for the return-to-work day after the holiday when cubicle drones were presumed to start online shopping en masse, using their employers’ computers.

Well, how did it work out in practice? And in particular, how did either day impact on online sales? Almost a week later it’s still not totally clear. Both “special” days saw increased traffic and sales online, according to several reports, and the measuring agency Hitwise even threw Thanksgiving Day into the mix, observing a spike in online market share on the very day when people are meant to be either busy cooking or comatose after the turkey.

Research firm comScore Networks assessed e-commerce spending on Cyber Monday at $608 million, a 26 percent hike over last year, and the company’s chief assessor, Chairman Gian Fulgoni, waxed extra-enthusiastic, saying,

“It’s the highest spending day ever recorded online. That said, we fully expect during the week of December 12 that the record will be eclipsed.”

By comparison, comScore found online retail spending on Black Friday reached $434 million, a 42 percent increase over last year’s sales. To date, total online retail excluding travel for the first 27 days in November comes to $9.48 billion, which accounts for a 24 percent increase over corresponding days in 2005.

Yet online still accounts for a relatively small chunk of holiday sales. “The online channel this season will represent about 7 percent of everything consumers spend,” Fulgoni said. “Offline is far bigger, but it’s not growing anywhere near the rate of the online channel.” Overall, comScore expects the holiday season to bring in $24 billion in online sales, a 24 percent increase from last year.

Nielsen//NetRatings, which trumpeted “Black Friday Trumps Cyber Monday” in a recent data release, found that unique visitors surfing from home the day after Thanksgiving were 19.2 million, compared to at-work uniques of 16.1 million the following Monday. However, when both home and work audiences are combined, Cyber Monday saw close to 30 million visitors, the most unique visitors to the Nielsen//NetRatings Holiday eShopping Index. Unique visitors on Black Friday totaled 27 million.

Black Friday beats Cyber Monday in terms of increase over last year, boasting 13 percent growth in unique visitors over last year, compared with Cyber Monday’s 7 percent. Incidentally, Thanksgiving Day itself showed 24 percent growth over 2005, and Sunday surfing to sites in the eShopping Index observed a 25 percent increase.

The blip on Thanksgiving Day was noticed by Hitwise. The Hitwise Retail 100 Index was up 13.3 percent this past Monday, but compared to Thanksgiving Day, Cyber Monday’s market share of traffic was down 33.87 percent; and Black Friday traffic was down 26.29 percent compared to the day before, when everyone was apparently surfing while not checking the turkey or watching football.

Such are the (not entirely predictable) changes in the American way of buying

The world of media commerce is mercifully becoming, even at its topmost
layers at last, more digitally literate.

The latest shift has come with the unexpected departures last week of Ross
Levinsohn as president of Fox Interactive Media – News Corp’s internet
division, which includes the social networking phenomenon MySpace.com – and
Jonathan Miller, chairman and chief executive of Time Warner’s AOL.

Both men have been replaced by more experienced executives from the
television business, reflecting the growing importance of video programming
to the big internet portals. In addition, the new hires at News Corp and
Time Warner show that both companies are installing executives with
extensive operating experience, now that a strategic vision has been mapped
out.

At Fox it’s oddly enough a family matter. From next week, Ross Levinson is
being replaced by his distant cousin Peter Levinsohn, a 20-year News Corp
veteran who was previously the head of digital media at Fox Entertainment
Group.

Over at AOL the stakes are high. Ever since the ill-fated merger between AOL
and Time Warner, the future of AOL within the Time Warner stable – which
includes studios, cable channels, magazines and a cable business – has been
under question.

A move this year to accelerate AOL’s transition from dial-up business to
being a content-orientated portal capable of attracting large internet
audiences and a share of the growing internet advertising pie means that the
division could now have its best chance to mutate from a drag into a growth
engine.

The job of moving from rescue to rehabilitation and ever upward falls to
Randy Falco, who spent three decades in NBC’s various television businesses
and rose to number two at the network.

Falco said something that might strike dyed-in-the-wool digirati, without
long TV memories, as a bit odd. “I’m fascinated by the Internet space”, he
told the Associated Press. “I see it as a very exciting environment to be
in. It reminds me a lot about network television 30 years ago. It’s a little
bit like the Wild West. There aren’t a lot of rules. That’s what excites me
about it.”

He said online advertising should grow 20 percent to 30 percent a year
industrywide, drawing dollars that might normally go to traditional media,
including his former employer.

Back there, Falco’s departure came amid tussles among top executives.
George Kliavkoff (formally with Major League Baseball Advanced Media, of all
interesting places) was hired in August to be NBC’s chief digital officer.
He is charged with “growing new digital businesses into significant
money-making operations”. Executives said the rapid pace of the digital
space meant there could be further staffing changes ahead.

“What people realize is that if you wait too long, you can lose your
audience”, one media executive confided ominously (and understandably
anonymously) to the Financial Times.