Unobtrusive Campaigns & Research: New Ways to Promote or New Ways To Provoke?

Remaining unobtrusive to a target audience’s personal space in the PR business is essential in order to to maintain a positive association in consumers with a company’s products and campaigns. While some PR firms stress doing their research unobtrusively, more recently, PR professionals have adapted the way to reach their target markets in campaign promotion “unobtrusively”.  Different from unobtrusive research, which is a procedure in which participants are unaware they are being observed or used as sources of data, unobtrusive campaigns aim to reach the target market with a message subtly. A big contrast to the big events and parties most PR campaigns host to raise awareness. The main aid in this worldwide campaign revolution is due to the ever-evolving world wide Web.

More exclusively, Pandora a music Web site that allows the user to stream songs for free, is leading the crowd with this “subconscious” form of promoting ads/campaigns. Explained in this article on Digital PR, Jameson Whiskey created an advertisement in the form of a playlist that users can stream songs. Most importantly, no pop outs take the user away from the site, everything stays on Pandora.

Of course traditional methods are still used to conduct unobtrusive research, but have adapted to fit inside the modern tech-friendly world. In this study, researchers used the eye-mouse coordination patterns on web search results pages to see what results people lingered on the longest with their pointers.  Check out this youtube video for a detailed example. Knowing where people place their eyes on web pages can be very beneficial to PR business people whom will know where to place ads, seeing as these places receive more mouse and therefore eyesight traffic.

It’s also important to note that even though unobtrusive research and campaigns aim to not be invasive to the viewer’s privacy, doing these research studies behind the participants back can be viewed as deceitful. Ethics play a big part in these campaigns and studies if using misleading information or withholding information plays a large role in the composure. Personally, I feel that as long as the study does not harm or extensively violate a person personal physical or mental property than the studies and campaigns can continue to occur “secretly”.  On the other hand, if obtrusive studies videotape the participant and expose publicly the tape, such studies should be condoned due to their unethical nature of violation of privacy laws.