Bruce on the Etel blog interviews the good doctor about her “Phertones” – ringtones that make you more attractive – “Make of it what you will, but a new site has popped up devoted to the promotion of Pherotones, which are presented as a sort of oddball, audible cousin of pheromones, which naturally you’ll be able to use as ring tones on your cell phone. The site lures us in with the convincing tagline “You’ve heard of Pheromones, now try Pherotones!” and gripping personal testimonials like this one from Derrick of NYC, I wasn’t much of a ladies’ man before Pherotones. Now they call me ‘Mr. Lady’-– Link. UPDATE: A Make reader may have confired our suspicion, this is part of an ad campaign. Read the comments for the details.
18 thoughts on “A Ringtone That Really Gets Under Your Skin?”
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It would appear that the company doing this MIGHT be McKinney Silver. Strangely I posted a link in my blog about this and got a number of hits almost immediately from them.
The Auditory Institute does not seem to exist – apart from doing auditing in Iran. And this company is saving Web Sites to their HDD for some unknown purpose. Such as to…
U:InteractiveClientsOASYSOA7216_Pheretones_Microsite
If you look at the Pherotones.COM domain information you will notice it is registered to North Carolina which is where McKinney Silver is located too.
darrylsmith – excellent work, this is what i suspected and i think you may have just uncovered it. likely the interactive group mckinney silver.
There is a fake wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Pherotone&action=history
The captured IP address on the page is easily tracked back to McKinney Silver
http://bimmer.roadfly.com/bmw/forums/southeast/5319667-1.html
(look at the info of the IP address for the poster)
I’m really sorry, but I’m a real scientist, and I can tell you that that is just a bunch of clever marketing people who think they can convince people to drop a few bucks for a worthless ringtone.
Yeah. And so is cancer, but you see us writing papers and submitting them to peer-reviewed journals. I’ve read many articles about rodent scrotums or the sexual habits of fruitflies, humans, hedgehogs, or trees. A “pherotone” is not “too sensitive” a subject. Sorry, but this is NOT something I’ll invest in. And neither should anyone. It’s just a gimmick.
There are some questions that need to be answered…
* If this is a viral campaign what is the product? Is it for some ringtone product? Or could it be for a movie, like they were doing with the movie AI? Or a TV Show like CSI, or Crossing Jordan.
* They copied my Blog entry on the subject to their LAN share. How many other blog entries were stored? The way I know this is that the counter on my blog uses javascript to take the URL and send it to my server for use as a page counter. This is probably a violation of my copyright – and other peoples.
* What is the legality of someone calling themselves a Doctor when they are not a doctor. I suspect this is called fraud
I would imagine that the product will become known when the campaign reach a certain viral distribution “percentage”. This of course may be hampered that the true facts are coming out before the product is revealed. I suspect that the product will turn out to be a cell phone.
As for the legality of their actions, I dunno. I do believe they have broken some “rules” and ethics at the very least, such as using blogspace but not informing them, creating a false article on wikipedia and being interviewed by a blogger and not citing that they are a fictional character.
In the end, if this information is spread far enough, it may self implode. It is never wise to try and fake out the internet because the internet always manages to come back and bite you on the ass. (Coke Zero’s blog being just one of the latest examples)
story about this here…
http://www.newstrend.com/2006/01/pherotones-ring-tones.html
I now have more evidence. I decided that I did not like the idea of McKinney violating copyright so I emailed them. The reply I got is below. I am wondering how many other people who have blogged this have had their Blogs copied…
Enjoy… Darryl Smith/Radioactive Networks
Dear Mr. Smith:
Thanks for your note. Sorry we didn’t respond earlier, but the first email did not reach its intended recipient.
We did indeed copy a very small portion of one of your blog entries for some research we are doing. But we understand that you would prefer we not do this, so as a professional courtesy we’ve deleted that content from where it was stored. We’ve also issued instructions not to copy from your blog again.
You have our apologies for causing you any inconvenience.
Sincerely.
JONI MADISON
PARTNER / CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER /
This is the new and intresting thing for me i could not imagine that this type of ringtones are present.
I think Erotic mobile tones are also the same thing.