Author Jennifer Belle felt that her new book, The Seven Year Bitch, needed a more creative publicity campaign than her publicist was providing. The placed an ad in “Backstage” requesting actresses with “compelling and infectious laughs,” to read her book on the subway and at New York City landmarks for $8 an hour. This was enough to interest the New York Times  in sending a reporter to cover the auditions, and then Belle sent the actresses she selected out in teams of two to the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the steps of the TKTS booth in Times Square, Washington Square Park, and the subways. They read the book out loud, laughing their infectious laughs, and when asked, told onlookers about the wonderful book they were reading.

The stunt got publicity that will d more to sell the book than the stunt itself. The New York Times wrote about it more than once, and other authors blogged and tweeted about it. Judith Regan invited the author on her Sirius radio show to talk about the campaign.

It was, in short, a great success.  But, asks Tribal Author.com, was it ethical?

Of course not.

It was creative, clever, aggressive, pro-active; it was effective, obviously; and it gave some starving actresses, of which there are many in New York (600 women responded to Belle’s ad), some much-needed work. It was still a dishonest method of publicizing the book, no less so than fake rave reviews in a press release and planted “reader reviews” on Amazon.com. The actress/readers are being paid to “enjoy” the book and pretending otherwise to the public. That’s a lie. What is actually a live and staged promotional stunt for the book derives its effectiveness from the fact that  people think it is spontaneous and real. That’s deception.

In philosophy, methodology and mechanics, this is in the same category as Democrats who recruit actors to shout racist slogans within earshot of the press at Tea Party rallies, or parents who pay a handsome young man to date theit lonely, homely daughter.  Ethically it doesn’t matter if some Tea Partiers might shout the racist slogans anyway, or that the young man might fall in love with the daughter (who blooms like a rose—you’ve seen the movies), just as it doesn’t matter whether Belle’s book is really funny or not. This is ends-justify-the-means marketing, deceiving the customer into believing a charade “for his own good.”  It’s not for his own good, however. The Tea Party crasher’s boss may say he wants to get the truth out to the public, but he really wants his political agenda to prevail. The parents acre about their daughter, sure; but they want to be able to stop worrying about her unhappiness and insecurity for a while, even if it means her new self-esteem is based on lies.

Belle wants to sell her book, and is willing to trick people in order to persuade them to buy it.

There’s no question about it: Belle’s stunt is unethical.

The real question, and a troubling one, is this: how could anyone think such a method wasn’t unethical?