Motor Mouths [1]
Submitted by Sheldon Rampton [2] on
The Hotrodders.com [3] website has launched a satirical spinoff, SpankMyMarketer.com [4], aimed at exposing "illegal stealth marketing" on behalf of companies including General Motors [5], Holley, Comp Cams and Dynomax, which they say has been posted on theirs and other auto-related websites. The first example, they write, was a "Spank My Monkey/Anti-Christ" campaign in which "Gas Monkey Garage, a fairly well-known hot rod shop," spammed websites with a "promotional photograph [6]" that "featured the owner of Gas Monkey Garage, Richard Rawlings, posing in women's thong underwear with his shop manager," accompanied by a video in which Rawlings declared himself the "anti-Christ of the Hot Rod World." More recently, a viral marketing [7] company called PowerTV [8] has been posting on auto forums under usernames such as "powermelissa" who calls herself "a big-time car girl" as she posts promotional videos for clients' products.