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  • Further muddying the word of mouth waters

    Posted on September 28th, 2007 by Spike and currently 8 commenting.

    My trusty Google alerts popped up an interview with an author being interviewed on the radio about this new-fangeled “word of mouth marketing” thing.

    Sandra Sellani recently published her book, “What’s Your BQ? Learn How 35 Companies Add Customers, Subtract Competitors, and Multiply Profits With Brand Quotient” and said that WOMM had a lot to do with the growth of the companies that are the subject of her book. Fair enough. But when the host asked her how word of mouth marketing works, she responded by telling this story:

    1066585716_4c3784f510.jpgSandra says she has a database of 60,000 that she sent an email to about her new book. But then she goes on to say that she really didn’t have a database of 60,000 people she knows. She has 500. But she hooked up with a guy at Target Marketing who harvested email addresses through an extraction program he put in her computer (people who have emailed her over the life of her computer or had been copied on emails sent to her, etc.).

    She says that she wouldn’t buy a mailing list. But this is what, in essence, she did.

    First of all, it’s not word of mouth marketing. If you want to try and shoehorn it into a WOM box, it’s viral. But I don’t think it’s even that. Sending out unsolicited emails aimed at getting people to buy something is called spamming. Maybe not with those 500 people that know you, but it is to the other 59,500 who were copied on an email to you or never got past one email exchange with you. That’s not giving permission to spam them. And it sure as hell isn’t word of mouth marketing.

    *Photo courtesy of the wonderful world of Flickr.

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  • It’s 1984

    Posted on September 27th, 2007 by Jennifer and currently 6 commenting.

    Pudding.jpgOkay, I have to caution you, I am going to sound incredibly paranoid in this post.

    According to The NY Times, Pudding Media is a new company that is currently beta-testing their online phone service. It operates much like Skype, only instead of paying by length of call, the calls are free. Free? Yes! Isn’t that great? The only hitch is that their machines will be eavesdropping on your calls to identify keywords in your conversations which will translate into ad content sent to your screen during the conversation.

    Any wonder I’m a little creeped out by this? I mean, there are even big-time, old-school ad people who are getting the heebie-jeebies here (”We’re getting more intrusive with each passing technology.’ - Arnold Worldwide Chief Digital Officer)!

    But CEO of Pudding, Ariel Maislos, says that people (particularly young people who are “less concerned with maintaining privacy than older people”) tend to multi-task when they’re on the phone anyway, so this seemed a logical forum. They’ve even found their advertising changing the course of conversations in some of their beta tests. ‘The trade-off of getting personalized content versus privacy is a concept that is accepted in the world,’ he said.

    Yikes.

    Personalized content, maybe. But I think of personalized content as something I’ve chosen to interact with, not mining my conversation in order to thrust more targeted meaningless drivel into my sight lines. Google has a similar functionality in the targeted ads based on the content of emails, and no one calls that personalized content, do they?  While I don’t feel particularly comfortable with the email version, it still feels less intrusive than listening in on my phone calls. Besides, Maislos and his brother/business partner both used to be in military intelligence. Though they swear the phone calls are not recorded… I’m afraid my “I just read The Handmaid’s Tale” mentality just can’t give them the benefit of the doubt. Remember the big stink when AOL accidentally leaked all that search data? This is just a big fat scandal waiting to happen.

    Maybe this is proof of my status as a digital outsider rather than a digital native - I’m just a fogie whose time is in the past - but in a world where we’re currently questioning our government’s right to monitor our conversations (and whether you support that governmental right or not), are we really willing to turn that right over to advertisers? More importantly… should they even be asking?

    Okay, I’m done. I think I hear Big Brother calling, anyway.

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  • The people have spoken.

    Posted on September 26th, 2007 by Spike and currently 1 commenting.

    Brought to you by Mr. Steve.

    http://www.vote756.com/marcecko/

    For baseball fans, like myself, this really puts the past 10 years of baseball (and, to true baseball fans, American history) into perspective.  And more importantly, it’s what the people have decided.  It’s what the fans (not the corporations that name ballparks and buy season tickets) get to say.  As fans, we’ve lost the ability to attend games (because half of all tickets sold are sold to corporations these days).  And most fans have completely given up on baseball.  Mark Ecko gave the disgruntled fan a chance to voice an opinion.  And while the media and the baseball execs are shocked and surprised, real fans guessed this outcome before the vote even happened.

    And it will probably mean big dollars for Mark Ecko.  Well worth the $750,000 investment.

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  • I Hate TV

    Posted on September 25th, 2007 by Jennifer and currently 1 commenting.

    “The key word in television these days is engagement.” - Norby Williamson, EVP of Programming, ESPN

    Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?

    Wait until you hear what defines “engagement.”

    You know those extremely annoying animated promotions that appear at the bottom of the screen during a show, usually advertising another show on the network? Well… they’re called ’snipes.’ And they make me want to throw things. And, according to this article in The NY Times, they are what the television industry sees as “engaging.”

    Sure, we’ve gotten used to the multi-layered tickers running across the 24-hour news stations, but it’s a slightly lesser evil because they have framed their shows within them. The tickers don’t obstruct our view, they’re just part of the crowded picture. It’s not Kyra Sedgwick and her flashlight wandering through my movie, giving me no new information other than the fact that I dislike Kyra Sedgwick even more now.

    TV muckety-muck types sight multi-tasking youngsters and video-game mentalities as key reasons for this increased (and ever-increasing) screen clutter. And, according to the article, they’re also perfectly fine with the backlash of angry viewers complaining that someone cartwheeling across the screen ruined the mood of this death scene or that denouement.

    DVR has given us the opportunity to avoid commercials, so stations are making the decision to assault us during our shows, not allowing us to watch what we chose, but distracting us with whatever quirky graphic or information overload they have decided is the REAL must see TV.

    Just another example of quantity over quality.  Give me something worth seeing and I’ll pay attention… maybe even interact.  Otherwise, these attempts to “engage” just end up competing for the honor of ‘thing I most want to hit with a hammer.’

    And I’m pretty sure that’s not the engagement they were shooting for.

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  • The Ghost of Blog Post’s Past

    Posted on September 24th, 2007 by Spike and currently 0 commenting.

    This blogging thing never ceases to amaze me. Case in point: Waaaay back in January of 2006, Jenn wrote a post about Bath & Body Works about how she’s disappointed that they are discontinuing her favorite line (scent) of products.

    Twenty months later, she’s not alone. And we’re STILL getting people from all over the place sharing their despair that B&BW discontinued their favorite lines. (The most recent comment from this weekend smells (no pun intended) like a B&BW employee, but doesn’t identify herself as such).

    All that to say that I don’t know if I should be surprised by these two things:

    1) There are so many people online looking to share their feelings with others who have experienced the same thing for something like this

    2) There are still so many big companies out there who are not listening.

    Oh, and lest I forget, B&BW hooked up with BazzarVoice sometime in the past year to put reviews on their website, which is a GREAT first step, but still not exactly engaging your customers.

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