Jonathan's Card revealed as viral marketing campaign
coffeestrategies.comI like the Wikipedia suggestion most of the time: assume good faith. He works with Starbucks at his day job. He decided to do a hack using an API he was exposed to there. This is not exactly nefarious, even to the severely-damaged-evil-meter version of nefarious which includes "intentionally and with forethought committing the sin of marketing."
I have often used work technologies/clients at play and play technologies at work.
Just to clarify, he's not using a Starbucks API. He's scraping the data from the user page. The API the card uses (for Twitter, for others to check the balance, etc.) is one he created for the project.
A company he works for, in a completely unrelated capacity (application architecture != marketing) has in the past, at least, worked for or with Starbucks. Whether that's ongoing or not is between Starbucks and Mobiquity, but even if they are it's no indication of a professional or personal relationship between Starbucks and Mr. Stark.
Jonathan's a friend of mine, so I'll take him at his word on this one.
I'd just like to point out that the application he architechts is for marketing, so it's not exactly unrelated. That said, I don't much mind either way.
So the company happens to be unaffiliated with Starbucks now, but is showcased because it was a past client?
Sorry, my response was worded a bit poorly - I'll edit it. I have no idea if they still have a relationship with Starbucks or not.
>>This is not exactly nefarious, even to the severely-damaged-evil-meter version of nefarious which includes "intentionally and with forethought committing the sin of marketing."
I don't see marketing as a sin.
However, I do appreciate full disclosure and some level of honesty.
His blog post twice mentioned that it was "totally not affiliated with Starbucks.". However, if Starbucks had been paying his company for marketing, imo he would have been better off in mentioning this fact.
Perhaps he would have been, but remember we're looking at this with the benefit of hindsight. It's easy for us to see people debating whether this was a marketing plow and think "why did he not prove his innocence in the first place".
But if you're just having a bit of fun doing something as a hobby, it doesn't neccesarily even occur to you that people might care what your link to Starbucks is. It's quite possible that the thought process in his head was "just in case anyone knows I've done work with Starbucks in the past, I should put up disclaimers that it isn't affiliated with them so there won't be any confusion", and not thought any more about it.
Agree, disclosure would have been better instead of "totally not affiliated with Starbucks". I checked the page again and see "I stumbled on the idea while doing research related to my work with Mobiquity related to Broadcasting Mobile Currency." Was it there before?
Yes, he stated that far before this story "broke."
The catch here is if he was just doing this on his own, outside of work - then not being very explicit about it being separate could get him and/or his employer in quite a bit of bother.
There's still the question of why Mobiquity pulled their client list from the website. That's either an eyebrow-raising coincidence, or they're not cool with casual visitors knowing there's a business relationship.
The author of the blog post states that he had to go to Google cache to find the page in the first place, so there's no telling how long ago it was removed from Mobiquity's site. A past affiliation does not imply an ongoing one.
It would make no sense for them to remove the entire page when they could just remove the Starbucks logo, so it could ell just be a restructuring of the site.
Considering both Starbucks and Mobiquity are actively promoting Jonathan's Card, I'm inclined to believe the relationship is ongoing. (Frankly, this is the kind of thing that companies like Starbucks usually aren't cool with if they don't originate internally) But you're right, it is ambiguous.
I don't think it's unreasonable that they'd have responded by deleting the page, though. It's the fastest and easiest option, (perhaps the website admin isn't available) and excising the Starbucks logo alone would look awfully suspicious. Seems like exactly the thing someone would do on the spur of the moment during an "oh shit" moment when they realized a viral marketing campaign might be compromised.
It isn't at all something a company would be against if they didn't originate it - it's good PR with no downsides. They wouldn't care if every Starbucks coffee sold from now for the next ten years was paid for with one duplicated card, as long as somebody was paying for it all through that card.
Most companies like enthusiastic customers, so long as they aren't too enthusiastic. Marketers like customers who respond to campaigns, but they get very nervous when customers take control of the brand on their own initiative. It sometimes ends up taking the brand in a direction the owner would prefer it didn't go. (eg. Cristal, Burberry)
In this case, you've got multiple people sharing what should be an individual account and the potential for damaging mainstream media stories if people feel like they're doing a good turn for strangers, only to have scammers empty the card. Not to mention that if Jonathan's Card is genuinely unconnected to Starbucks, his use of their trademarks would make the lawyers uncomfortable.
This may not be a full-fledged viral marketing campaign, but I'm skeptical that Starbucks would be so enthusiastic about it if the guy responsible didn't have a preexisting relationship with their marketing department.
In my experience in marketing (tech and gaming related, so admitedly not exactly the same area), most companies I've worked with go to sleep at night dreaming of something like this happened.
Somebody who loves your company showing initiative and doing something interesting that creates headlines for your brand? And you're not paying the tens/hundreds of thousands that it would have cost to get some firm to think of this idea? Hell yes we'll take that.
It could be a move to have Starbucks disassociate themselves with Mobiquity. Perhaps Mobiquity didn't have permission to use their logo or name them as a client. If Jonathan's card brought it to Starbucks' attention, that could precipitate this kind of rapid rewriting of the web.
Assuming you've jumped from correlation to causation, trying to guess at the reasoning behind it is just that, a guess.
Jonathan is an executive at a marketing shop that launched in March. They list Starbucks second among 16 clients. Their chief strategy officer is a Wharton School senior fellow. When these guys launch a mobile equity -- er Mobiquity -- campaign it isn't a weekend project. From Mobiquity's homepage infer that Starbucks pays Mobiquity "to identify new revenue and ROI opportunities" and "capture real-time behavioral insights through analytics, profiling and modeling." Call me jaded, call you credulous. Either way it's brilliant publicity.
I would like to assume good faith but strange that Jonathan was so active on HN the day his card story was here but is nowhere to be seen on HN today/this thread.
He could have noticed the hits coming from here so he checked in to answer questions.
I'm not so sure that I trust "coffeestrategies.com" (to me, a random stranger on the internet with an apparent anti-Starbucks agenda) more than I trust "Jonathan Stark" (to me, a random stranger on the internet with an apparent pro-Starbucks agenda)...
I'll say this: if it's truly a corporate sponsored viral marketing campaign, it's a very good one. I'm not convinced by this random blog post though that this isn't just someone genuinely doing what he says he's doing.
http://jonathanstark.com/blog/2011/07/14/broadcasting-mobile...
The cached client* page is still visible when I checked it. Starbucks is there. Somehow they removed it after the story came out. Let's see, it must be coffeestrategies' fault.
Edit*: about -> client
Nah. I don't know Jonathan, but I've followed him on Twitter for quite a while after reading his O'Reilly published book on iPhone web app dev. (I think he's also the guy who took over maintenance of jQTouch.) Anyway, watching the whole thing evolve on his Twitter stream, it sure seems sincere. "Suspected to be a viral marketing campaign" might be a more appropriate headline here.
Conspiracy theories are fun to think about, but too many things don't add up for this one. Thin evidence of it, a potentially anti-Starbucks agenda by coffeestrategies, the fact that Jonathan is a real live person with tons of professional credibility, and the fact that in order for it to be true, Jonathan would have had to pro-actively lie to all those of us who follow and trust him.
That's strikes me as exceedingly unlikely.
Big thanks to all of the folks who have supported sanity on this thread. My thoughts here:
https://www.facebook.com/notes/jonathans-card/the-real-deal/...
Peace, j
Hi Jonathan, I'm not up for the witchhunt, as far as I'm concerned people have done far worse than what's been suggested here ... However, don't you think this could have been avoided by not saying 'I am not in any way affiliated with Starbucks' ? - it's a bit misleading, and I think people are right to be suspicious of your motives as a result, dontcha think ?
Why did mobiquity erase this page, which lists Starbucks as a client? http://mobiquityinc.com/clients/
Forgive me if this rubbed you the wrong way. I could've worded the title better. FWIW, no one (at least not me) is questioning the good intentions behind this even if it was planned. I just thought it was a cool idea, viral campaign or not.
I think the project is a great idea, and it would still have been a great idea even if Starbucks was involved. Thanks for doing it!
Quite tellingly, you make no denial of the main accusations. The question is not whether this was your idea, but whether you were telling the truth when you said that your website was 100% not affiliated.with Starbucks.
No, that's just a sideline, a thing people are investigating as to proof to the actual main question, whether or not this is a viral campaign sponsored by Starbucks. He quite firmly denies that.
No, because time is a consideration. If SBUX jumped on the bandwagon to sponsor it after it became a big hit. Because he could be telling the truth as at the point of the card's creation, it was just a hobby project of his and SBUX knew nothing about it.
The main question is whether he is affiliated with SBUX in any capacity, because that's a statement he made from the start and it's provably true or false.
My guess is that the truth is somewhere in between. That it was a hobby project. But that as Starbucks is a client, he figured getting some goodwill from them through it would be frosting on the cake. He didn't intend to make money directly, but obviously, if it was a success, SBUX's benefits and so does Stark's company, indirectly.
This is his website's traffic on the day of the HN mention: https://twitter.com/#!/jonathanstark/status/1005925637146624...
The card had been active for more than two weeks previous. My guess is that a project that is intended to be a mass-viral ad would not wait for someone to randomly submit it to HN.
Mobiquity released a statement on TC confirming no affiliation with Starbucks.
http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/10/the-vast-starbucks-conspira...
"Since you don’t care, you might as well click on the paid advertisement below so Google will send me $.50."
I hope the author knows, this is a clear violation of ToS for AdSense and will likely jeopardize his account status.
Edit: Sent the author an e-mail, hopefully he fixes it before it becomes an issue.
Don't worry, it's not a violation because he was just joking. (Yes, I am indeed being sarcastic.)
1) I read the 'The company later had its employees comment on my blog with fictitious postings' out of context. It's not referring to `Jonathan's Card` but to the `Pay it Forward` campaign. Just pointing that out since it seems like others were not clear on that detail either.
2) Calling those `Pay it Forward` posts "fictitious" isn't merited. I would not be surprised to see an employee of any company posting a defense of the company they work for.
3) Anyone on HN who read "but unfortunately failed to anticipate that I can see the originating IP address of incoming comments" and didn't say to themselves "how does OP know they were trying to obfuscate their identity?" should be embarrassed.
It's always a good idea to read posts critically, and it's always a good idea to accept the least cynical understanding of a situation until compelling evidence is provided to the contrary.
I'll consider this submission as bait until something substantial is posted.
On top of that, there's encouraging clicks on Google ads regardless of interest (some call it click fraud).
http://www.coffeestrategies.com/2011/08/08/starbucks-and-the...
3) When an employee of a company publicly defends that company without disclosing their financial interest, I find it difficult to believe it just didn't cross their mind.
Does this mean the below is a fabricated statement?
Response from Starbucks: "We think Jonathan's
project is really interesting and are flattered
he chose Starbucks for his social experiment"
I don't drink coffee, nevermind go to Starbucks. Can somebody explain whether it's normal for Starbucks to allow people to walk in and make purchases with a scanned copy of a card rather than the physical card?!
This to me is the most surprising and questionable aspect of this campaign being legitimate, but since nobody else is surprised I'm guessing it's normal? It seems like a total violation of the physical security embodied by requiring the purchaser to physically possess the card. Furthermore, depending on the transaction processing model they use, it could subject them to be fraud.
This is basically how all of the mobile starbucks card apps work. You install the app on your phone, logon to your account, and then when you pay it shows an image of a card with your barcode. In this case, its just using a static image instead of the one generated by the app. I suppose they were ok with the tradeoff of convenience over the security risks.
So you just need an image of a Starbucks card to purchase on that account? Presumably they're not bothered because it's their customers money that they're being free and easy with, the more fraud the more money they make ...?
I don't really know per se, because we don't even have Starbucks where I live, but:
I thought the image was pretty indistinguishable from the app when viewed in an image browser. Most of them don't show any borders, so if you walk on the desk with the image ready, you probably couldn't tell the difference?
I don't drink there often enough to be sure, but I suspect they have an app that displays the card's barcode. At that point, the difference between a live app and a screenshot of the app (which is what was on "Jonathans card") is pretty slim.
might be, but keep in mind that Starbucks' PR may genuinely not have been "in the loop" about this.
Understood, but the owner of that Twitter account is not Starbucks' PR, correct?
Either way, I'd rather 'assume good faith' as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Currently I'm just curious, as I've been following the card story since before it got picked up by the more mainstream media.
I'd call it astroturfing, personally.
I really don't think this is the case at all. I've known Mr. Stark for some time now and he is an honest man of integrity - a good, decent guy.
It's an experiment, exactly as he says it is. I discussed it with him the very first day he started the project.
I'll choose to believe my friend on this one.
If that is the case, then why did the company delete its graphic of the clients? http://mobiquityinc.com/clients/
Apparently, Starbucks is a client of theirs, and Stark is a VP: Mobiquity Vice President of Application Architecture.
I can't give you a reason other than speculation. The author of the blog post states that he had to go to Google cache to find the page in the first place, so there's no telling how long ago it was removed from Mobiquity's site.
It makes no sense for them to remove the entire page when they could simply replace the Starbucks logo with that of another clients. Couple that with the fact that we have no idea when the page was changed and it sounds more like removing the client page was part of a decision regarding the overall content of their site and not an attempt to hide anything.
A past affiliation between Starbucks and Mobiquity has no bearing at all on the current situation if it is not ongoing, and still doesn't imply any personal affiliation with Mr. Stark.
Someone within the last 24 hours went in and deleted Google cache though..
You don't have to be the owner of the page to request it be removed from Google cache. Who knows, the author could have done it to lend the theory more credibility and try to generate more scandal and thus more blog traffic.
See? Un-founded accusations can work both ways.
I'm inclined to believe this was a genuine experiment too, or at least a cool viral marketing campaign that I hope to use - for a free coffee :)
Out of curiosity, is Jonathan on HN too? It would be interesting to hear out of the horse's mouth here. I see a user with an ID of "jonathanstark":
http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jonathanstark
P.S. Not all Starbucks cafes accept this card/image. I tried it this morning and was told they don't accept this method of "payment."
Not all Starbucks shops accept mobile payment yet. To do it, they have to re-fit their POS computers, the roll out has been taking almost a year and it's still not complete.
He is and yes, that is his account. I suspect he'll chime in when he notices this.
Well if the professional connection really is just a coincidence, I regret the wording of the title. But do notice I stated as I posted this that I don't think this is wrong on any level really even if it were a manufactured campaign. Again, it's a cool story and very clever either way and I could see Occam's Razor going both ways on this.
pg- Feel free to edit the title if you want.
I have no reason not to believe you, especially when you add in the fact that Mr. Stark is getting a free coffee for every 15 purchased on his card.
It's win-win-win.
seconded. jon is a really good guy. very generous in every sense of the word, and in no way a sketchy human being.
put the pitchforks down please.
I think there's a pretty big difference between a guy trying out something cool and an elaborate viral marketing campaign constructed by an agency.
I think this was the former, honestly. Maybe I'm just not jaded enough yet.
..which I don't think takes anything away from it. It was still clever in implementation, concept, and now we can just add viral campaign to the list.
Also, I think it's worth pointing out that the people at Metafilter were on it from the start. I don't know if that says anything about liberal arts and social science types being more cynical and skeptical or if the science and technical crowd types here are just easily entranced by the technical implementation of something and don't see the forest for the trees. It's probably both.
Something about this story seemed to hit a nerve on HN. It didn't get nearly the same traction on Reddit or Metafilter.
Metafilter has a long and storied history of uncovering these sorts of things, so it's not a total surprise to me that they were on this pretty quickly, although I admit I skipped that post.
Unless I'm missing something, I don't think it's been "revealed as a viral marketing campaign". So, Jonathan's company has worked with Starbucks in the past - am I missing something? Is that the extent of what we're working with here? If so, you might as well conclusively claim that I'm a Starbucks employee paid in part to sweep all of this under the rug.
Disappointed with the misleading title of the post-- "Jonathan's Card revealed as viral marketing campaign".
Browsing the comments, it's clear that a lot of people are jumping to conclusions without reading the full blog post (as is the wont of many on the web), which suggests /some/ link between Starbucks and this campaign-- but is circumstantial at best. It's anything but the smoking gun that the title would have you believe.
What really happened is another story (I'm inclined to "assume good faith" in this instance), but I'm tired of seeing disingenuous titles of articles around the web that are used to blatantly misinform.
The only "bad" thing in my eyes is the cover up, if it is indeed being covered up. However until it's proven otherwise I'm going to assume this is good old finding-shit-where-there-isn't-shit which the internet is oh so good at!
Even if the guy does work Starbucks (directly or indirectly) it's a clever idea, I enjoyed looking at it (and wish I could have taken part) and this won't change if it was some "viral marketing".
I'm generally willing to give someone a pass for repeatedly emphasizing that their statements/projects/opinions are not in any way affiliated with their employer. I don't often make statements tangentially related to my work, but when I do I try to be as clear as possible that I am just a dude and not a spokesman, and beg people not to blow my statements out of proportion and get me fired.
On the other hand, this man appears to be a marketer, so I assume that he has plenty of opportunities to try out his marketing ideas at work, and doesn't do them as a side project. I think the biggest question I have isn't "did he do this on his own time, or during his 9-to-5?", but "were 'real' people putting money on the card, or did the Starbucks marketing department just refill it when necessary?" As long as it was real people putting the money in and taking the money out, it's still an interesting social experiment, even if it was crafted as a marketing campaign.
I am disappointed after reading the article. Based on the title I expected to see some evidence. A business relationship that may not even be current and scrubbing the site doesn't count.
I think it changes from cool project for people with a bit of extra cash to give others coffees to just another piece of viral marketing. Especially since it was stated he was within no way affiliated with Starbucks, even if this does have nothing to do with them he should still mention this affiliation.
Created by Starbucks for marketing or not it still is a cool idea. I haven't actually made it into a Starbucks yet myself but I have the image on my phone ready to try it out if I am near one.
It makes sense though if Starbucks is running it though since it never stays empty for long and never gets too much of a positive balance. They feed it just enough to keep people interested but make it empty enough that people still have to pay half of the time because its empty.
I agree regardless of being initiated by starbucks or not it's a cool idea, but this blog post is likely to kill the card, very unlikely that people will put money in.
It's totally hindsight driven, but the fact that he started every HN comment with the same "Jonathan here" type canned greeting should have probably raised an eyebrow.
(amending this: after reading up a bit I don't agree with my own original post. It's a very odd thing to do -- I don't ever see anyone on HN post like that -- but he's not a fictional person or anything like that.)
i just read that as mildly n00bish behaviour - he came to hacker news simply because the story was posted here and he wanted to make sure his posts were known to be from him.
FWIW his account is over a year old (though not very active).
It looks like the same thing that happened this time. Someone posted an article of his to HN, then he created an account here to comment.
Saying he wasn't affiliated with Starbucks was dishonest (if indeed he was working for them, which I don't think this article really proves), but really does it matter that much? We were all interested in the experiment, can't we applaud some good marketing?
Fake or not, I really liked it. It was different and most importantly it made me feel good. If this is advertising I don't mind. It's a lot better than normal commercials I tend to ignore.
I just wish they didn't pretend that they had nothing to do with it.
Now I feel pretty foolish for spending a few hours of my time developing a mobile app to use his API.
I wouldn't feel foolish at all. Regardless of whether it's a viral marketing campaign, it was a neat idea that seems to have caught some steam.
Furthermore, you hopefully gained something from those few hours of work, whether it's knowledge, satisfaction, or just a little more experience.
This was just my initial reaction. I've now completely reversed my thinking on it, and not because of Jonathan's response. I believe that anyone who puts enough time into a project like this (sponsored or otherwise) deserves a great deal of credit and respect regardless of their intent or the outcome. I would like to think that I'd receive the same amount of admiration, and I don't wish to taint his achievements in any way.
We all love building cool and interesting shit, and it's more fun when people open up APIs and datasets and services for us to tap into. I did learn something in my few hours of hacking, so I thank Jonathan for the inspiration. I don't feel foolish in the slightest - only empowered to unleash one or two of my own experiments into the public.
Not sure how credible this is but the article does have a comment from someone saying that the twitter feed said the card had money when in fact it did not. They allude that this is part of the marketing ploy.
Did anyone else experience this?
My guess would be that it's just not updated in real time and they just happened to go at the wrong time. If we're giving the benefit of the doubt...
I put in $11 on Sunday at a very slow time. I saw the $11 top up shortly after in real time on the @jonathanscard Twitter feed. It was the only tweet for about 10 minutes when my $11 was mostly used up.
My proof! http://twitpic.com/62shre
Then someone contacted me via Twitter to say that they used my credits: https://twitter.com/#!/PinoyxJay/status/100455783979954176
Believe what you want.
I appreciate that you asked in earnest, but the original comment conjures images of "trip-and-fall grifts" and "playing the long con". I usually look at big things like this in terms of where the money's going. But in the context of 'get unwitting customers to show up for free coffee when there's no money on a viral marketing gift card so that they'll spend money anyway', I'd ask 'where's the credit going' -- and no one at Starbucks corporate will claim creating a sleazy confidence game for some career leverage. And I'd also ask Occam for a razor.
You are correct that the Twitter feed isn't quite real-time. It only updates once a minute and the card was getting a lot of activity.
I didn't know it was possible to manually clear Google's cache of a web page. Turns out, it is: https://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answ...
Whoever ends up being responsible for this-- kudos to them; it has been an entertaining experiment. If it was Sbux, it does make me wonder how many of these viral campaigns I've missed because they've been better guised.
How stupid do you have to be to send comments from Starbucks HQ... Wow. For such a clever plot, this is a really sad ending. Reminds me of the Mona Lisa story a few days ago.
Read the article again and click the link. There was one Starbucks employee at Starbucks HQ who made one comment about a totally different story (the Starbucks pay-it-forward chains).
When I worked at Blizzard, I'd occasionally post pro-Blizzard comments on random blogs; sometimes I'd do it while at work on break. So what? They were still my own honest opinions and not some campaign by Activision to defend Blizzard's honor or something.
Oh, I didn't click the link - I just assumed he was being correct when he said "employees". Your situation is a little different, if this is a starbucks advertising campaign.
Yea, personally I think disclosure is still important, but an employee that happen to like randomly astroturf is one thing, a entire campaign of astroturfing is another.
This is awesome?! A viral marketing campaign directed at us! Wow.
Response from HN could be: "...we are flattered that he chose HN for his social experiment"Or we could just go the "Machiavellian manipulation of HN readers by lying like a rug."
Meh, either way. I don't do SBUX. I can make my own caffeination much cheaper.
Wow, everyone here fell for it, me included. Although I have to admit, this is the first time I've seen a viral campaign involving the creation of an API.
"fell for it" - I see what you are saying but I think you are giving 'them' 2 much credit.
717 karma on the original thread, and nobody suspected a thing!
Now that I know this is Starbucks-funded, I suddenly feel the urge to buy Frappucinos using the card and make a giant pyramid.
Now that I know this is Starbucks-funded
Do you?
Surely it's un-funded. Then they'd make money because you go to the till having ordered 30 coffees and "oh look" no money on that card, cough up $120 (or whatever).
marketing campaign or not, I think it's really clever. If all marketing campaigns were even half as interesting, we'd all be a lot better off.
If it's true, this is so genius.