With my wife studying Spanish, I decided to look into some Spanish software so I could learn some too. Rosetta Stone was the first one I started with and then started reading some reviews. From there it lead me to another spanish program called “Learning Spanish Like Crazy” which was recommended. Then I did a google search, and came up with a huge number of AdWord ad sites offering ‘objective’ reviews of Spanish software. One of the programs at the top of these reviews was “Rocket Spanish”. The website for RocketSpanish is like a huge marketing page which requires scrolling to the near bottom to learn the price of the software/CD’s. So I started trying to find some “objective” review of the Spanish software/CD’s and RocketSpanish has completely dominated the message.
They do this by having blogs speaking up the software, they have a lens on Squidoo, they have pulled out not only all of the Adwords for “Spanish Review” but also including words like Scam, Fraud, etc. The way they get you to click on their AdWord sites is to have lines like: “Don’t buy Rocket Spanish until you read this” – the resulting review has the software as being the best one out there.
Digging further, all of the domains were registered using a proxy (to make it difficult to track back who owns them). This was the first example of essentially introducing SOOO much marketing noise online that it’s impossible to really even tell if the software is any good or if it’s horrible. My guess is that the product is at least adequate and so people are not apt to feel like they were cheated (and some reviews that recommended others mentioned RocketSpanish without derogatory remarks).
Anyway, this all got me thinking about online marketing. With so much information at our fingertips, we go online to find out many other consumers perspective, but if you have some cash to spend, you can introduce so much “real looking” perspectives that it drowns out the rest. I hope this does not spell the future of marketing online; in fact, it almost reminds me of the ads that existed in the early 1900’s which were clearly propaganda coupled with the SPAM that invades our inbox with clutter.
So here is your challenge, see if you can find a legitamate review of “Rocket Spanish” and send it to me.
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