When virtual followers become real followers... creepy.

A couple days ago I read an article in The New York Times titled "Personal Touch, as Seen by Thousands," by Andrew Adam Newman.

Mellow Mushroom Pizza Bakers has recently embarked on a new advertising venture. The have many followers on Twitter and as a company that cares about its fan group, Mellow follows them back. Taking it one step further, they have decided to LITERALLY follow their followers. Mellow set up hidden cameras and filmed as a person in a giant Mellow mascot suit followed one of their twitter followers around for the day.

Their tagline for this new ad is "Follow us and we'll follow you." I find this quite creepy, but the president of the brand stands by their new marketing method.

Annica Kreider, vice president of brand development stated "Part of why we do things like this is to say that we are a different brand and we aren’t going to give you the same old sales propaganda" (NYT.com). 

           

However, I can't help but think of all those times my mother told me not to connect with people I don't know on the internet, because then they could find you in real life and harm you.

I don't think I would take a stalker, dressed up in a mushroom suit, so light heartedly. This ad may elicit responses because of its extreme, out of the box approach, but I think I am going to unfollow some companies after reading this article.

Personal Touch, as Seen by Thousands - NYT.com