We all know that marketing is a necessary part of capitalism in the 20th century and, in its purest form, serves the useful purpose of communicating information about new products and services. But that doesn't mean we have to like it.

This is especially true when marketing people are turning to more extreme ways of getting our attention, widening the gulf between reality and spin to a dangerous level for anyone whose job involves making purchasing decisions.

IBM is a good example of why these creative geniuses need to be brought back down to earth, and fast. Big Blue is in trouble with the San Francisco authorities, to the tune of $100,000, for defacing the City by the Bay with graffiti.

It seems that back in April, IBM paid a group of graffiti artists to do some street marketing for them. They were supposed to use a biodegradable chalk to paint the slogan 'Peace, Love and Linux' on the walls and pavements from the hippie hangouts in Haight Ashbury up to the edges of the business district. Trouble was the chalk was about as biodegradable as depleted Uranium.

The guerrilla artists were given 30 days' community service while IBM was slapped with a massive fine.

What makes this story all the more amusing is that another upholder of straight talking and plain speaking in IT did exactly the same thing around the same time.

X marks the spot

To hype up the Australian release of its Xbox game console in March, Microsoft's PR people hired some local artists to spray-paint boxes framing big green Xs on the sidewalks in some of the country's trendiest suburbs.

But some residents of Sydney, many of whom had recently paid millions of tax dollars for new sidewalk paving, took offence and planned to sue the PR consultants, the aptly named Spin Communications, for all they were worth.

Unfortunately the stupidity and distortion of other marketing campaigns are not so obvious. What's more, being the victim of overzealous advertising can lead to many more problems than a few inappropriately daubed buildings.

Take, for instance, the gulf that exists between vendor hype and the realities of many internet technologies. Nearly half of end users believe that vendors which supply technology for doing business over the web have little understanding of how the user's company works, according to research from Datamonitor.

In the boom times, when companies had lots of money to throw around, taking a chance on the vague assurances of a vendor wasn't such a problem; you could always throw something out if you weren't happy.

But companies are now calling on web-based technologies such as customer relationship management and purchasing to make a difference to the bottom line. Can you really afford to take someone's word for it anymore?

Straight talking

Hopefully the answer is no, and that will put pressure on the vendors to do more straight talking. vnunet.com's sister publication Computing kicked off a campaign along these lines by abandoning its ebusiness section, and trying to cut down on the use of the term in the magazine.

The word had been hijacked by every two-bit technology provider as a way of making legacy technology sound sexy and innovative to the point that is doesn't mean anything anymore.

All that is needed is a bit of honesty and the answer to some basic questions such as, if something such as the Xbox is so funky and innovative why is Microsoft spending half a billion dollars to get people to buy it? After all that's a lot of spray paint.