Insights into the Digital Marketing Landscape

Digital marketers with experience in the entertainment industry suggest that much of the online content can be misleading. This finding aligns with the widespread “dead internet” theory, which posits that bots, rather than real users, create a significant portion of what we encounter online.

In a recent chat with Joe Lim, some unsettling aspects of the online marketing realm were brought to light. Lim, who heads a company named Floodify, describes his agency as one that enhances content reach in an “organic” way.

He shared with Vulture that, astonishingly, 90% of what circulates online is advertising, and notably, much of that stems from his own efforts. At one point, his firm managed a staggering 65,000 fake accounts on social media, designed to promote trending topics for clients who paid.

Lim has collaborated with all major record labels, boasting 40 million views despite only having 100,000 followers as an artist himself. This kind of disparity really makes you think about visibility and actual engagement.

In a similar vein, Jesse Coren and Andrew Spellman, the co-founders of the digital promotion agency Chaotic Good Project, spoke about their methods in a late-March interview. They admitted to promoting music by embedding tracks as background audio on fan pages, meme accounts, and sports highlights.

Spellman described this approach as “trend simulation,” asserting that “Everything on the Internet is fake.” Koren added, perhaps a bit apologetically, that while the manipulations might be unsettling, they do control the narratives people encounter. Even if someone hasn’t delved into a full album, their initial impressions can largely shape public discourse.

A writer from New York magazine, Lane Brown, who tracks paid campaigns for artists including Justin Bieber, noted that the sense of a collective online conversation often results from these manipulative tactics.

He emphasized that public opinion is shaped and measured in real time, and every signal we receive—from a trending song to a sudden backlash—can be artificially orchestrated by unseen players with agendas.

These marketing strategies are not specific to any one group; they come from various sources, including record labels, studios, and even political campaigns. Essentially, it seems that anyone can hire services to disseminate content through a network of editors who turn it into clips, which are then shared from accounts that appear genuine.

This all really lends credibility to the “dead internet theory,” which asserts that bot-driven traffic has eclipsed human traffic, a notion that’s gained traction since 2016. Some argue that the bots we once knew have evolved into more sophisticated AI counterparts.

As for Lim, his company faced closure after mistakenly flooding social media with the same video across 7,000 accounts, all of which ended up being banned. He expressed concern that trust in social media would wane in the next few years, claiming that people would soon find ways to deliver content through AI, which he believes will effectively persuade individuals in ways we can’t yet fully grasp.