I guess this is a form of experiential marketing … well, in the sense of your experiences are helping to market Madonna‘s new album, Confessions.

Here’s the deal: Call 1-888-2-CONFESS and confess. Before you do, Madonna herself will remind you that by confessing, you’re also consenting to your confession being used “in any form, at any time, until the end of time — so think twice if you’ve been naughty.”

The confessions get aggregated into a Podcast, of which there are currently nine installments. The results are a mixed bag. (“I put my darks in the laundry with the whites!” winds up juxtaposed with “I’m a sales rep who gets customers by sleeping with them.”) At its most poignant, all this is, really, is an audio version of the superlative Postsecret blog. But it’s also an outlet for crank callers and self-promoters (I wonder how many hits a URL touted on the Podcast is likely to get), as well as some creative shenanigans that occasionally generate real humor (one guy calls to profess his love of Garry Shandling; later, he calls back to confess he has a thing for Charles Grodin, too).

Ultimately, though, all this user-generated content is served up in service of helping Madonna sell more CDs and make more money. For the goofballs and the cranks and the “let me see if I can come up with something that’ll make the Podcast” folks, well, they’re just having a bit of fun. But what does it say about the person making a genuine confession?

(Madonna is so off my radar screen anymore, so thanks to Ken Leonardo over at Commotion! for the heads up on this one.)

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 4th, 2005 at 10:36 am and is filed under Internet Stuff, Marketing Stuff.