“A website called Dubit Insider has the following message for the nation’s children: “Dubit believes you are the best people to promote brands, products and services – not celebrity endorsed television ads!” How depressing. No wonder I never heard back from Irn Bru, and Greggs the Bakers said I was “too hammy” to play a sausage roll.

I suppose it’s just cold hard economic reality. Dubit, which specialises in getting kids to market to kids, is only paying its school-age “brand ambassadors” £25 a week. I was asking twice that. These rewards, paid in vouchers for the very products they’re peddling, are for mentioning “key campaign messages to friends, both on and offline” about brands such as Fanta, Nintendo, Cheestrings and the new Barbie MP3 player. Crap, basically.

The young recruits are exhorted to be subtle: “Write down the key points in your own words and make sure it doesn’t sound too rehearsed… Don’t start a chat about the project – it’s best to look for natural opportunities to drop it into the conversation.” It’s great to find multinational corporations investing in the future of British espionage.

This is one of those odd news stories where you feel you’re supposed to baulk at the new low that corporations have sunk to but don’t because you’re surprised they’ve only just sunk to it. It’s like when Gregory Peck died and people responded: “I didn’t know he was still alive!” to which you can only answer: “Well, he isn’t.” I assumed companies had been up to this kind of shit for years – it’s rather nice that things weren’t as bad as I thought, even if they were inexorably becoming so.

Public limited companies are amoral. They’re driven purely by their constitutional requirement to turn as large a profit as possible for their shareholders. People can be good or evil, ambitious or lazy, angry or fearful – plcs are none of these things. They unthinkingly, unswervingly, pursue money – that is their programming.

[…] Corporations have no such moral sense.

I’m not an anti-capitalist. I really don’t think this amorality is a problem, as long as it’s understood. If you walk into the lion’s enclosure at a zoo and the lion eats you, it’s your fault. When we expect large companies to act out of motives other than financial self-interest, we only have ourselves to blame.”

via @juspar, who calls this ‘brand ambassadorship’ “spamming”, adding that “viruses and spam are increasingly generalised mechanisms of capitalism.”