Tweaking The Laugh Track. The Ethics Of Orchestrated Responses | by Freddy Tran Nager, Marketing Prof & Professional | Jun, 2023

The Ethics Of Orchestrated Responses

Once upon a time I worked as a writers’ assistant on one of the worst TV shows in history. Critics skewered it, audiences avoided it, even the actors complained about it. Yet no one did anything to fix it.

One day, as I walked by the office of the showrunner (the show’s lead producer), he called me in. “Freddy, can you hear that?” he asked while repeatedly playing a few seconds of the laugh track. “There’s an odd laugh there. It’s driving me crazy.” I told him I couldn’t hear it, so he waved me away.

For those not familiar with the term, a laugh track (also called “canned laughter”) is prerecorded laughter used in television shows to tell the audience when something is supposed to be funny. Even if filmed before a live audience, some shows will use laugh tracks to augment the real responses. While canned laughter has thankfully fallen out of favor with most showrunners, you’ll still hear it on the occasional network comedy.

The show I worked for got mercifully canceled after just a few weeks. Yet I still ponder the showrunner obsessing over an errant guffaw in a laugh track — which no one in the show’s meager viewership would ever notice — instead of devoting the same time and concentration to fixing the actual product.

That said, the showrunner was far from alone in focusing on audience manipulation instead of critical issues. Many professional communicators today employ a variation of the laugh track: we call it “influencer marketing.”

Cue The “Influence”

By influencers, I’m not referring to the bona fide experts who can shape thinking and behavior, such as media critics, religious leaders, editorial writers, politicians, and the like. I fully endorse working with them, as I tell the students in my Influencer Strategies course. For this article, I’m referring to the social media stars who get paid to smile, cheer, and endorse products on cue. Living laugh tracks, if you will.

When news mogul Michael Bloomberg ran for president, he paid social-media influencers to endorse him. According to The Daily Beast, Bloomberg gave each influencer a flat $150 to create and post content “that tells us why Mike Bloomberg is the electable candidate who can rise above the fray, work across the aisle so ALL Americans feel heard & respected.” In addition, Bloomberg hired a company called Meme 2020 to place sponsored posts on popular Instagram accounts, all to create the illusion of popular support among young voters.

Like the showrunner, Bloomberg used canned responses in hopes of influencing the real audience. Did it work?

In most influencer campaigns, measuring “success” is challenging, with correlation confused with causation (often intentionally by marketing agencies). That said, according to a Forbes Under 30 Voter Survey published in late February, Bloomberg came in second behind Bernie Sanders among young voters — albeit, a distant second (16% versus Sanders’ 38%).

But what if the fake endorsements had worked?

Fake It Till You Make It?

It’s one thing to lobby newspaper editors, politicians, or celebrities for an endorsement — those are time-honored practices, and the endorsements seem legitimate (though some involve not so honorable quid pro quo arrangements).

It’s quite another to overtly pay for endorsements. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission requires paid endorsements to publicly state that they’re paid ads, and the endorsements must be truthful (endorsers may not make false claims, such as experience with a product they’ve never tried). In addition, some websites, such as Amazon, ban paid endorsements (though the ecommerce giant is drowning in fake reviews).

Yet, what if paid endorsements and responses follow the letter of the law? Are they ethical?

In the social-media influencer industry, a variety of fraudulent behaviors have become common practices — ironic, since no industry uses the term “authenticity” more frequently. (That’s why I don’t let my students use any variation of “the A-word” except in a critical context). A 2019 anonymous survey by HypeAuditor found that 60 percent of American Instagram influencers admitted to having committed some type of fraud, such as buying followers, likes, and comments, or participating in comment pods (organized groups of influencers who comment on each other’s posts to boost their viewabiity, since social-media platform algorithms favor “engagement”). Similarly, a 2018 New York Times exposé (“The Follower Factory”) revealed that hundreds of thousands of Twitter users — from politicians to professors — had purchased followers.

The motivation behind faking it is obvious: large vanity metrics (followers, likes, etc.) attract sponsors and deals. I once pitched a book idea to a publisher, who subsequently asked me how many followers I had. I didn’t bother responding, but I wish I had replied, “How many do you want me to have?”

The large vanity metrics have another value: they attract legitimate followers. Social media users are more likely to follow someone who appears popular; the vanity metrics confer credibility, even if they’re faked.

Cue the laugh track.

An old Hollywood saying goes, “Sincerity is everything. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.” The quote has been reworded by various actors over the decades, but it keeps circulating regardless of generation or media technology. Although I’ve singled out influencers for scrutiny, contrived popularity has been alleged in bestselling book lists, top 40 music charts, nightclub opening crowds, even academic publishing (see Duffy & Pooley 2017, “’Facebook for Academics’: The Convergence of Self-Branding and Social Media Logic on Academia.edu”).

Social causes are not immune. One PR firm in Los Angeles hires actors and other gig workers to conduct protests and picketing on behalf of their clients. Their pitch: if your cause doesn’t yet have enough supporters, put on a show. There’s even a term for this fake grassroots enthusiasm: “astroturfing,” named after the artificial surface in Houston’s Astrodome stadium.

So I submit for your consideration: if contrived, orchestrated, and even faked responses lead to social good, are they justifiable?

Saving The World, One Cut Corner At A Time

Imagine that you’re directing a communication campaign to convince teenagers to quit vaping. You decide to pull a Bloomberg and hire social-media influencers to spread your message. Unfortunately, their initial posts receive little response — some of your influencers may not be as influential as they claim — so you decide to spend a few hundred dollars to “prime the pump” with fake likes and a comment pod. Neither activity technically violates federal laws, and though the social-media platform prohibits such fraud, their feeble attempts at enforcement mean that few offenders get caught. Even if the platform chances upon your chicanery, the worst they can do is delete your profile and ban you from the premises. Should that happen, you can simply use a different email address to start a new profile.

So your ruse works. The boosted posts attract real followers along with real influencers — professional athletes, pop music stars, and young politicians — who attract even more followers. It’s a virtuous cycle launched with a little vice. For the teenage followers, these power influencers’ collective efforts make vaping appear as distasteful as their parents’ dance moves. And by the end of the run, you can point to a decline in vaping rates within this target audience, with the teens crediting your campaign for motivating them.

Now, not only did you achieve a social good, you enjoyed professional success, invitations to speak at conferences, and enough income to make a dent in your student loan debt. The ends justify the means, yes?

In addition, you discovered that vaping companies have used the same deceptive social-media tactics to attract teenagers in the first place. So you were just fighting fire with fire, right?

Costs And Considerations

Before you exhaust your supply of self-justification clichés and embark on this slippery slope, consider these scenarios:

1. If your disingenuous tactics get publicly exposed, what will happen to your reputation and your campaign? Will you lose all credibility? (“If they faked their number of followers, what else are they lying about?”) Will you lose the support of the athletes, musicians, and politicians? At the least, will you get fired from the campaign and even ostracized from your profession?

2. By relying on artificially inflated metrics, will you escalate an arms race that will come down to which side can outspend the other? Imagine that Bloomberg had won the youth vote and, ultimately, the presidency. For every election season from now on, every candidate would feel obligated to play the faux influencer game despite little chance of gaining a competitive advantage. Instagram would come to resemble our physical mailboxes overstuffed with cheap political ads.

3. What if you were to invest your time and resources into fixing the campaign instead of faking the metrics? Your research and analysis might generate insights into your audience — insights you can transfer to other campaigns, causes, clients, and colleagues who share your values.

Yes, when it comes to orchestrating public responses, there is a lot to evaluate in terms of potential rewards and possible repercussions. While I will neither promise outcomes nor advise anyone on values, I can and do encourage critical thinking. In so doing, you’ll dedicate your time to analyzing what matters most, instead of obsessing over canned laughter.

A previous version of this article appeared in the USC Public Diplomacy Magazine.