Journal of a Cosmic Anthropologist

As marketer Tim Longhurst put it: “Being socially destructive — eroding people’s confidence in each other — isn’t a simple by-product of this kind of dishonest marketing, it’s the main outcome.”

Nick Ellery had a similar take: “The line is to be drawn when you deliberately try to deceive your audience, with no real intention to cause dialogue, but simply to deceive in order to create traffic. This is no different to spamming. It sucks that this campaign is proceeding and that I will never buy anything from Witchery Man, or hire Naked as a strategy firm.”

Yet Naked continued to insist they had done nothing wrong. In a great example of marketese, Managing partner Adam Ferrier told me: “If it gets to the point where you have to be 100 per cent truthful the whole time, it becomes a very sterile outcome. People will be afraid to try different things.”