"A Ringtone to Make You Irresistable!"

Naturally, when you see something like this in your email, you recognize it for what it is.

"Can my ring tones make you sexy?" read one ad posted last month on the Hollywood gossip blog Egotastic.com, depicting a red-haired doctor in a white lab coat. "Experience the ring tone secret I discovered in Denmark that's too hot for mainstream science," the ad promised, directing visitors to a Web site, pherotones.com. There, users could download special cellphone ring tones that, when played, were supposed to attract the opposite sex.

Turns out there's no such thing. It's an example of what's known either as "buzz marketing" or "viral marketing".

But rather than the revolutionary product that Pherotones promised, the ads were the beginning of a buzz marketing campaign under the guise of a fake product (Pherotones) and a fake doctor (Dr. Myra Vanderhood) with a fake Web site (Pherotones.com), all for a real client with less than $250,000 to spend.

The real client is Oasys Mobile, a little-known cellphone content provider that sells games, cellphone wallpaper and ring tones that can be downloaded. Oasys, based in Raleigh, N.C., enlisted the advertising firm McKinney & Silver, in Durham, N.C., to introduce its brand inexpensively — with a nontraditional campaign that it hoped would grab the attention of its desired 18-to-24-year-old demographic.

You have a new product. You don't have a lot of money for an ad campaign. Certainly nowhere near as much as your chief competitors have? So what do you do? Why, create a little buzz. Get people talking. Then, get them to do your marketing for you. Share the video with your friends. They share it with their friends. It's a regular virus!

But the overall campaign is garnering interest: after placing ads on blogs like Gawker and Defamer, Pherotones.com is now averaging 10,000 page views a day. Last week on Technorati, a Web site that tracks blogs, Pherotones.com was in the top 10 percent of the most popular blogs worldwide. It has also attracted attention on insider blogs like AdRants, a Web site that closely tracks the advertising industry.

Just one problem.

The campaign has also revived a question that is routinely asked in the advertising industry: is it acceptable to use advertising to trick consumers?

Sure!!!

One recent study has indicated that the buying public is willing to be fooled. A study by Northeastern University released last month found that even when participants who pitch products in word-of-mouth campaigns identify their commercial affiliations, it usually does not affect consumers' willingness to pass the marketing message on.

Today we begin to see if this campaign works.

Now Oasys will be able to test the campaign's effect on sales: starting today, the Pherotones Web site is revealing its client by directing visitors to Oasysmobile.com.

Raising the ire of people who initially believed in the power of Pherotones is simply a negative consequence of the whole effort, said Mr. Ban of Oasys Mobile.

"You run the risk in any campaign like this that you might offend somebody," he said. "But even if you offend somebody, it seems to spread the gospel of the campaign."