Archive for the ‘Marketing’ Category

July 22nd, 2010

AT&T
This one is just charmingly funny. Someone made a serious booboo at AT&T recently which resulted in every customer getting an email announcing new store openings in the midwest. It’s nice and all that there’s a new store opening in Michigan, but I live in Philadelphia. Oh, okay, wait, there’s another store opening somewhere else I can’t easily get to? La de fuckin’ da. Twitter is abuzz about this snafu. Will AT&T send yet another email apologizing or come up with a more creative way of harassing their customers to apologize for harassing them?

Facebook
Facebook allows you to search for friends by plugging in their email address. Email addresses that aren’t registered with facebook will get email messages telling them that So and So has invited them to Facebook. If you’re already on Facebook, you can link your accounts.

There’s one hitch – you can’t look at the person’s profile without logging into facebook, and if you search for them, well, odds are you’ll get a good couple hundred of results. So here’s the scenario:

1. I have multiple email addresses.
2. I don’t know immediately who this person is, but I can’t view their profile to confirm one way or another
3. Facebook keeps sending me reminders that this person has friended me on their site.
4. I can’t stop this email from sending without blocking all future emails (from people I may in fact want to be friends with for sure).

Now, I don’t arbitrarily have multiple email addresses. I have multiple email addresses for an excellent reason, namely that I use them on different sites and they help me preserve my anonymity. My facebook profile is public in one sense, but I don’t want to link it to say, an old forum account where I was a site administrator for a few years. While all of these profiles are public, they aren’t all tied to me.

What pisses me off is that Facebook doesn’t allow for the possibility of someone wanting to keep their online identities separate. Facebook is arrogant enough to try and force me to connect all of them. I don’t have any desire to do that. I can’t identify who’s trying to friend me on that email, but it doesn’t really matter – I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be friends with that person. Still, there’s no way for me to contact them outside of Facebook, and Facebook won’t let the subject drop and stop emailing me about it.

If I block the Facebook notification emails, I block all emails of that variety, even from people I might know and care about and want to reach out to on my existing account.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, Facebook.

January 27th, 2010

Get a coupon and a hilarious mad-libs style mash game at http://www.qdobacraftyourlife.com.

July 17th, 2009

In college, the focus was brands – brand identity, brand strength, branding branding branding. Never mind my professor could have moonlighted as Super Douche, or that I did little to disguise my complete disgust with him and his chosen subject matter (devotion to all that is Brand. We are the Brand. You will be assimilated).

As an American, a consumer and someone who spends far too much time thinking about such things, I could have told you two years ago (and, wait, I did tell people two years ago – they laughed), that the day of the Brand was coming to an end.

We’ve seen the folly of Brand management, where the brand identity is all-powerful and all-important – to the exclusion of all other things. Protecting the Brand is priority number one, whereas the customer and his/her experience is not really much of a priority at all. keep reading »

April 28th, 2009

It’s nice to know I’m not the only person who’s totally weirded out by the fast food ads that arbitrarily mix sex in with their sandwiches. When I think of sex sandwiches, I think of that as a euphemism for a threesome, or, conversely, a serious and disgusting food safety violation.

In Dan Neil’s LA Times article, he talks about just how bizarre these ads get – you’ve probably seen some of them: keep reading »

April 13th, 2009

A coworker excitedly approached me today, the dollar signs literally visible in his eyes. He informed me that dooce makes about $40,000 a month in ad revenue from her blog.

I’ve set up the new blog site for the boyfriend, and at every opportunity, I nudge him and say, “Blog.”

He’d make a great online celebrity. He’s had some experience with it before. I, by contrast, don’t do too well. Take this blog as a for instance. I’ve been blogging for eight years. I’ve had ‘blog’ type websites for over twelve years. My street cred alone should have earned me a serious fan base by now. Instead, I turned the most interesting of my fans into friends, and deleted blogs. Repeatedly. keep reading »