A few months ago the marketing geniuses at Dr Pepper approached the popular news portal Fark.com and asked its owner, Drew Curtis, about possible advertising prospects short of annoying pop-ups, interstitials, and spam. Naturally, Curtis forwarded the proposition to the site, asking its legions of Farkers what they thought. The effect rippled through the Fark community like a tasteless water cooler joke, and for the next several weeks Farkers bleated, willingly, what Dr Pepper never actually asked for. The drink showed up in photoshop contests, "drink Dr Pepper!" infected user comments, and very quickly it become a new Fark cliché (something repeated ad nausium by everyone for comedic effect. Imagine the site full of graduates from the Adam Sandler School of Comedy).

Dr Pepper eventually never made any deal with Fark, but the fact that it's still toted around by Farkers today illustrates what the soft drink manufacturer may have been studying all along: viral marketing. And now they are launching a new product to harness the power of net propagation to generate public interest in it. Specifically: the blog scene.

Cows are the most docile animals on the planet; living vegetables so lethargic you can actually tip them over and they won't do anything. Marketing the antithesis of cow behavior is like trying to sell the idea that male figure skaters aren't gay. It's chocolate milk. They call it Raging Cow. And the marketing wizards at Dr Pepper have a blog set up, ragingcow.com, as the grass roots launch point for what they hope will be acceptance into the internet blogosphere to be spread, pandered, discussed and rampantly referenced by other bloggers. These marketing meisters at Dr Pepper have definitely done their homework. Blogging is the new creative medium for youth today. Meaningless statistics suggest three out of four teenagers have at least some kind of homepage or presence on the internet. Marketing this new "milk-based product with an attitude" (tude, as the kids all say) via online word-of-mouth and link propagation shows that it's "totally hip" and "down with it", dude. To get the campaign off its feet they even screened over three hundred bloggers, hand-picking six of them to be "in the know", the original trendsetters for the extreme lactose revolution.

That's a smart idea. Bloggers are socially aggressive attention whores. If there's one thing they love, it's validation from credited sources about their importance. They love receiving free things all the time. I'm not sure why the marketing prodigies at Dr Pepper would stop at six, however. Simply send all three hundred bloggers a case of Raging Cow and a couple Dr Pepper T-shirts, and they'll write about you for days. They love to rejoice in how you have acknowledged their individuality of public self-deprecation, black-rimmed glasses and emo music.

But this is nothing new. Marketers have been tapping into internet trends for awhile. When Coca-Cola released their Emperor's Clothes of a soft drink "Vanilla Coke" into the mainstream, an odd website popped up called VClounge.com, pretending to have the real goods on the story behind Vanilla Coke and its insidious plan for world domination, written by an insider at Coca-Cola. The site, of course, was fake. Set up by the Coca-Cola Company itself, all of its purported secrets and special insider information was simply made up. And they stole that idea (fake website pretending to be true) from the greatest internet marketing hoax of all time, the Blair Witch Project.

The marketing overlords at Dr Pepper are taking a page from these examples, and going one further (and by going one further I mean lying more convincingly). There's a term for this shrewd coolhunting technique: "astroturfing". It means infiltrating a subculture to market as part of pretend participation. Already this raging cow icon is hearkening images of Poochy the Dog, the much maligned mutt of the Itchy & Scratchy cartoon in an episode of the Simpsons, conjured up by board room execs as a proactive, skateboarding, flannel-wearing, bug-eye shades adorning symbol of Generation-Xtreme.

And like Poochy, the Raging Cow is under heavy attack by bloggers who challenge its sincerity. The blog itself has been graffitied by Farkers rued at the intrusion of corporate marketing on internet culture. And lately the blog has felt less like a blog and more like one of those anti-drug government propaganda sites: dissenting user comments are deleted almost as fast as they are put up. There is an admin monitoring the site around the clock for disparaging remarks, something no self-respecting blogger would ever have to do. Integrity is the only currency in the blogging world. That and grainy web cam photos of yourself naked.

As for the ad campaign itself, it is so astonishingly dumb one must wonder how the marketing masters at Dr Pepper actually got paid to come up with something this trite and pathetic. "Milk with attitude"? Is the carton is going to bite your nose off if you drink from it or something? Honestly, how is drinking something normally coveted by babies and kittens supposed to be daring and adventurous? Are you supposed to wail on a guitar and go skydiving while you drink it? Maybe if they come out with a Bukakke Blast flavour, but I still can't see the connection between it and bungee jumping. There are several things wrong with this ad campaign.

First of all, milk is not extreme. I know this sounds stupidly obvious to most of us, but someone still hasn't told the marketing gurus at Dr Pepper this. Saying milk (or chocolate milk, or chocolate strawberry banana milk, or Pina Colada Chaos) has attitude is like saying figure skating is the most violent sport in the world. And they actually use the word "attitude". As if just merely saying that automatically lends the drink street-cred. People aren't impressed by attitude anymore. There is nothing raw and edgy about sanctioned unconformity. Besides, having an "attitude" can mean anything. It could be a pleasant attitude or an enthusiastic attitude. You might as well be saying "milk with an outlook on life!" because the only way milk will ever have a bad attitude is if you leave it in the fridge for six months.

Secondly, this is phony. The cat is already out of the bag. Bloggers are not talking about the product, they are talking about other bloggers talking about the product, and they're mostly irate at the marketing minds at Dr Pepper who are freeloading the blogging medium to try and sell their bull juice. In short: it is not working. Bloggers-especially teenager bloggers quick to classify everything as "sucks"-are savvy enough to know a poser when they see one.

Thirdly: Raging Cow. Uh huh. Right. As if people want to be reminded about bovine spongiform encephalitis while they're drinking milk. It's a pretty debilitating disease and is remorsefully pitiful to watch a cow stricken with it. What the hell were the marketing experts at Dr Pepper thinking? That's like Colgate coming out with new "Gangrene" toothpaste. Adding it up, it almost makes this whole program doomed to failure from the start.

Unless, of course, the marketing barons at Dr Pepper realize all this, and they have deliberately constructed the corniest ad campaign ever in order to appeal to the meta-sarcastic, kitsch-ironic satire sensibilities of today's youth. Nothing spreads faster on the net than something deplorable. From the audacity of cyber begging to the rotten personalities of situation reality shows, people revel in despising other people. Maybe this is what the marketing illuminati at Sgt. Pepper have envisioned all along: create something so bad and transparent that people will talk about it just to lambaste it. Much like how John Lennon's comment of the Beatles being bigger than Jesus led to a huge backlash of Beatles record burnings, which resulted in album sales shooting through the roof; people buying albums just to burn them.

Not that we should be worried about their eagerness to commodify dissent, but come on. It's still not going to make us drink their crummy milk.