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• Gilpérez set to lead Telefónica Latam: buzz

Just horsing around with the headlines this morning, as usual.

The Latin American digital convergence market is just about the most interesting game on the planet, if you squint at it correctly — a version of basequetball developed by soccer players, say.

Semealogy, meanwhile, where I registered that little note — it was the top non-BS headline in Valor Econômico today —  is nothing more than an instance of Semantic Wikimedia that lives on my rented server space. If I wanted it to, however, it could easily behave like an automatic news robot.

I saw one of these gizmos in action the other day: A company announcement broken down into its component factoids being pumped out at one twit per second (tps) into twitterspace, taking about five minutes to run through the cycle.

Twitter provided the widget and customized it with the branding of the client, then stuck it in a footnote to the page so that it would rack up impressions without anyone having to actually notice it or actively select it.

They call it churnalism. Bill Gates and George Soros each fork out $50 million a year to make it happen.

Among the worst examples I have seen was the Twitter user who became the talk of the twitterverse overnight by obtaining 185,000 followers in a span of about four hours.

No one was actually talking about the user — a poster child for some iSomething or other — but the decibelmeter was registering Beyond the Voice of God.

I was tracking the guerrilla marketers behind the campaign at the time — working out of a P.O. Box in downtown Goiânia and incapable of keeping straight their various noms de guerre.

That sort of blackhat SEO is kid stuff, though, in comparison with the sort of thing Valor Econômico did to readers during its ongoing promotion — we are getting it home-delivered for free at the moment, and have been for more than a month — just last week.

In a “special section” dished up with the exact same look and feel as the real newspaper, it ran sponsored content not identified as such, mixed in with bylined pieces from persons with ambiguous relationships to the reportorial staff and the subject of coverage.

In the middle of this hodgepodge, a stirring full-page message from your friends at British American Tobacco, swearing their allegiance to the theology of free will, free markets and an end to the traffic in Parguayan Marlboros.

Here in Brazil, this campaign comes joined at the hip with a push for self-regulation of the capital markets and a last-ditch effort to bring the mass media sector within the jurisidiction of the Brazilian FCC, CADE, the antitrust regulator.

It always makes me feel … greasy … when fellow foreigners go all Col. Kurtz on us like this, out here in the heart of darkness like this.

Sure, you CAN reduce your risk of negative news coverage to almost zero, but SHOULD you?  Do you really think people don’t notice?

The local villain to watch is Souza Cruz, the Brazilian Philip Morris behind several Cato Institute clients that one might mention.

When a film was made of the life story of President Lula a year or so back, for example, the fiery labor leader pointedly chain smokes from start to finish — as he used to in real life — and trade unionists only drink Brahma beer.

The film was financed in large part by Brahma and Souza Cruz.

During the military dictatorship, a man named Jean Manzon, editor of Paris-Match, pulled an almost identical stunt with a special propaganda section on the Brazilian miracle.

Manzon had helped found modern Brazilian photojournalism at Globo and produced a remarkable series of propaganda short subjects on behalf of the coup plotters, conditioning audiences for the state of exception to come.

Manzon is still celebrated as an example of Globo’s storied Standard of Quality.  I have some clipped material on the guy somewhere here on one of these 250 GB bricks ….