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An investigation by Vulture has claimed that underground agencies, often living on closed platforms like Discord, are paying ordinary people to post clips and create artificial hype around everything from Justin Bieber to skincare brands. Is every trend and social media conversation secretly being manipulated by stealth marketing?
What if everything you see online, such as a viral cultural moment, a skincare product, a controversial celebrity scandal, or an election campaign, was manipulated and promoted by niche marketing agencies that create artificial outrage and conversation?
This phenomenon is apparently very real and is permeating every social media platform almost completely undetected, at least according to an investigative report by Vulture. Titled ‘The Feed is Fake,’ this excellent article outlines an underground system in which regular people are paid to clip content and promote different intellectual properties in order to push algorithms and generate discussions that seem authentic. Vulture suggests that almost every brand and company is getting involved, from big record labels to independent podcasters.
What does this mean, in real terms?
Agencies such as Spade, Clipping Culture, and ClipHaus hire tens of thousands of independent creators who repurpose content and redistribute it to spark algorithms into action. This could be through fan pages, meme pages, anonymous accounts, live clips, or background audio on unrelated visual media. They also drum up controversy or discussion on specific topics to boost engagement and create issues out of minor discrepancies.
These initial ‘boosts’ then enter mainstream feeds, where genuine human viewers begin to share and engage, thereby creating a ‘viral’ trend that seemingly appears to be authentic. It’s not the same as a paid promotion or traditional advertising campaign and is wholly different from the tried-and-tested method of bots and paid viewership, as everyone involved is a real person. This means it’s technically within social media fair use and is largely unaffected by current content policies.
Stealth marketing has, by sheer definition, remained largely undetected for a while now. It has recently been brought to the forefront thanks to several high-profile admissions of paid underground campaigns by agency founders (though, at this point, I wonder if it’s all by design) who boast they can ‘drive impressions on anything.’ This particular flex came from advertising company Chaotic Good Projects via a Billboard podcast titled ‘On The Record,’ who were outlining their marketing campaign for the alternative rock band Geese.
As WIRED mentioned last month, Geese are a Brooklyn-based act that generated significant buzz last year for their fourth album, Getting Killed. It quickly gained traction with enthusiastic music-goers, eventually culminating in a sold-out tour, a Saturday Night Live performance, and a Coachella appearance. Soon after, accusations of being ‘industry plants’ began to surface, with a popular Substack piece pinpointing the relationship between Geese and Chaotic Good’s stealth marketing services. The agency confirmed that it had indeed clipped content for the band, pushing short performance videos and interview segments online.
Soon after this was made public, Chaotic Good removed any mention of Geese from its website and took down its ‘narrative campaigns’ page that explicitly detailed how the company drives artificial conversation on social media platforms. WIRED concludes its article by asking whether this kind of new-age, guerilla-style marketing is any different to paid blog advertisements from last decade, or bribing radio stations with lavish gifts in the pre-internet era. Has anything ever been genuine in pop culture? That’s likely a wider question that requires greater analysis.
Still, it feels disconcerting to know that anything we see online might be premeditated and quietly orchestrated by a team of anonymous freelance clippers and accounts. Vulture highlights that journalists and critics, the traditional cultural gatekeepers of quality, are being duped by their social media feeds as much as anyone else. This, in turn, warps who is deemed ‘important’ by prestigious publications and outlets, canonising brands and artists in unconsciously biased ways. Bieber’s recent Coachella performances look to have followed some of these stealth marketing strategies, which means we were fooled and unwittingly contributed to his recent success. Oof.
These marketing firms will likely tell you that their work is simply modern, forward-thinking advertising that utilises different avenues of engagement to maximise reach for a fraction of the cost that a physical billboard demands. Why pay $1000 for a real poster or a standard YouTube sponsor when a stealth approach can be literally ten times more efficient? It’s good business and is clearly insanely effective, reportedly being utilised by nearly every industry you can imagine, from stock markets to elections to celebrity drama. It is seemingly everywhere and inescapable.
What makes it so ethically concerning is that our understanding of truth, curated taste, and human art is being coerced by invisible forces that nobody is really aware of. Gen Z are already facing an unprecedented era of misinformation amidst the emergence of AI. Understanding what is real and what is generated by ChatGPT is hard enough, let alone trying to decipher which cultural moments or artists are genuine and which are calculated ‘campaigns’ via semi-anonymous clipping farms on Discord.
As we know, Gen Z are reshaping how we interpret truth and where we get our intellectual credibility from. They’re no longer necessarily turning to legacy institutions such as the BBC or newspapers like The Times or The Guardian for information, but rather forming their opinions via TikTok and Instagram. Social media sites are incentivised to prioritise engagement at all costs, and aren’t as bound to rigorous legitimacy checks. This creates the perfect breeding ground for stealth marketing firms to dictate the direction of pop culture and mainstream public sentiment. Real individual agency begins to erode, leaving the marketplace of ideas weaker and more commercialised than ever. Throw in AI on top of that, and it leaves the internet thoroughly washed of its original, democratic sensibilities.
Perhaps The Gen Zer is also part of a stealth marketing campaign. We’re not saying it is, of course, but the fact that it’s impossible to tell is problematic.
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