After a dismal winter, the Detroit automakers are sitting on lots full of unsold cars. Ford (NYSE:F) is showing some marketing savvy by playing to this abundance. It is giving Ford Fiestas to 100 people that are active in social media to drive around for six months, without any restrictions on what they post about the cars. The drivers were chosen from 4,000 people who posted videos on YouTube explaining on why they should be chosen to represent "The Fiesta Movement."

Playing on the reality TV craze, the drivers chosen will be given missions, supposedly taking them to new places for new experiences. New foods is not mentioned, so I guess they won't be required to scarf down plates of worms or the like.

Marié Digby is a big hit on Google's (NASDAQ: GOOG) YouTube. The 24-year-old's version of Rihanna's "Umbrella" is receiving airtime across the country, and her videos have been viewed over 2 million times. Last week, Walt Disney's (NYSE: DIS) Hollywood Records announced they'd signed her to a contract.

A nice rags to riches story, heh? Except it isn't. The Wall Street Journal stripped the everywoman cover off of Digby by revealing that she'd signed with the record company back in '05. Her YouTube-based PR campaign was carefully constructed by Hollywood Records to launch her in a way that would gain the cache of authenticity viewers grant to user-developed content.

Last year's controversial "LonelyGirl15" campaign demonstrated that some of the smartest people in America work in marketing. Noting the over-the-top success of that program, the ad industry is now awash with companies promising to launch viral campaigns of this nature, inspiring person-to-person emails for their product (you gotta see this!), and playing on the sense of ownership we have when we think we've discovered something authentic that others haven't.

The question here, I think, is one of transparency. Obviously, in light of the way the internet has evolved, we plebeians are willing to trade some of our time viewing advertising in return for otherwise free content. I'm not convinced, however, that we are willing to embrace stealth marketing, where the message is disguised such that we may not identify it as advertising.

The ruse of Digby's launch is minuscule in scope, but nonetheless causes me to trust what I see and read just a little less. And suspicion is an anathema to marketing.

If you've spent much time trying to figure out how to market a startup business, you've surely come across one-half of the bald head of Seth Godin. Seth ("still in hardcover, still no hair" he says about his first and most famous book, Permission Marketing) made his fortune by selling a company, Yoyodyne, to Yahoo Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) in 1998, and his fame by capitalizing on this instant stardom by writing iconic and colorful books. Books full of buzzwords and internet-savvy platitudes.

Ever heard of viral marketing? "Small is the new big"? The importance of telling "authentic stories"? While Seth didn't exactly invent the concepts, he certainly popularized them, applied them to the web and (most importantly) used them to make millions of copies of his books almost float off Amazon.com's warehouse racks onto the bookshelves of aspiring internet millionaires everywhere.

Fame came naturally to Seth Godin, and it's no surprise he's been named #5 in Forbes.com's "The Web Celeb 25" ranking. But if you ask me the Seth Godin phenomenon is like a pyramid scheme gone legit -- by creating "buzz" around viral marketing, he markets his books virally -- by proclaiming the brilliance of ebooks his becomes the most popular, ever -- by insisting that "All Marketers are Liars" he becomes the most trusted, most "authentic" of all. You could say that he's living (bank account balancing) proof that his marketing schemes work; yes, they work, and best of all for Seth Godin.