Filed under: Off-topic marketing stuff.

I’d say any viral marketing campaign that gets picked up by the BBC is a success. BeautifulPeople.com just pulled off a doozy, and the evil marketers behind this one deserve a bonus.

The site announced that due to their weight gain over the holidays, 5,000 members will be booted off the site. From the BBC piece:

‘Letting fatties roam the site is a direct threat to our business model and the very concept for which BeautifulPeople.com was founded’, site founder Robert Hintze said.

The members were singled out after posting pictures of themselves that reportedly showed they had put on pounds over the holiday period.

The site allows entry to new members only if existing members vote them as sufficiently attractive to warrant it.

I’m a bit of an internet marketer myself, so I appreciate what they did there. Is it offensive to most people? Hell yes. Offensive to their target audience? Nope.

It’ll get them thousands of links and tons of traffic. Smart marketing, moral issues aside. BTW, check out the notice on the bottom of their homepage. Provocative stuff like this generates buzz.