Bloggers: We Won't Be Fooled Again

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/07/business/media/when-bloggers-dont-follow-the-script-to-conagras-chagrin.html Editor: Great article on bloggers refusing to be duped by marketers. - MT

NYT - IN August, food bloggers and mom bloggers in New York were invited to dine at an underground restaurant in a West Village brownstone run, apparently, by George Duran, the chef who hosts the “Ultimate Cake Off” on TLC.

Enlarge This Image

Brian Ach/AP Images for Marie Callender’s

George Duran, left, a celebrity chef, and Phil Lempert, a food industry analyst, hosted evenings at an underground restaurant, where invited bloggers thought Mr. Duran would prepare the meal

• 
  

Sotto Terra, the invitation said, was “an intimate Italian restaurant” where attendees would enjoy a “delicious four-course meal,” Mr. Duran’s “one-of-a-kind sangria,” and learn about food trends from a food industry analyst, Phil Lempert. The invitation continued that upon confirming — for one of five evenings beginning Aug. 23 — bloggers would receive an extra pair of tickets as a prize for readers and that the dinner would include “an unexpected surprise.”

The surprise: rather than being prepared by the chef, the lasagna they were served was Three Meat and Four Cheese Lasagna by Marie Callender’s, a frozen line from ConAgra Foods. Hidden cameras at the dinners, which were orchestrated by the Ketchum public relations unit of the Omnicom Group, captured reactions to the lasagna and to the dessert, Razzleberry Pie, also from Marie Callender’s.

But it was the marketers, not the diners, who were in for the biggest surprise. The hidden camera is a staple in commercials, from Folger’s ads in the 1970s and 1980s where diners in upscale restaurants unknowingly enjoyed instant coffee instead of the house brew, to more recent Pizza Hut ads, where diners, again in upscale restaurants, unknowingly enjoyed pasta from Pizza Hut.

But while consumers tend to laugh along with the ruse, ConAgra was about to learn that bloggers, who often see themselves as truth-seeking journalists, find the switcheroo less amusing, especially when it entails them misleading their readers beforehand.

“Our entire meal was a SHAM!” wrote Suzanne Chan, founder of Mom Confessionals, in ablog post after the event. “We were unwilling participants in a bait-and-switch for Marie Callender’s new frozen three cheese lasagna and there were cameras watching our reactions.”