For over five years I have had the pleasure of working in marketing. When I started back in 2005 I was just a lowly marketing gopher. Now I’m in charge of creating campaigns for email, print, and social marketing efforts. When I see bad marketing I usually try to help. Today I received a terrible piece of email marketing from Verizon Wireless. I tried to help, but sometimes you just can’t help.
Here’s the email I recieved:
The email goes on, but it doesn’t get any clearer. There’s nothing especially heinous about this email. it’s just not clear what the email about other than the fact it’s from Verizon Wireless. The call to action is puzzling:
Please take a moment to review the information below and then feel free to give me a call at your earliest convenience. I look forward to hearing from you.
When you review the information it’s unclear what we’re supposed to be talking about. I gather that I received this email because my phone is eligible for an upgrade. Why doesn’t the email just say “You’re eligible for an Upgrade – Contact Us” or something along those lines?
I decided to email the rep and pass along the helpful hints. Besides, it’s not his fault that the marketing department put this together. The Verizon rep emailed me back with this:
from xxxx, Christopher [email protected]
to date subject mailed-by
the email is actually about a upgrade but the idea behind the email is to get you to respopnd to meif you would like to make an appointment so we can go over some options on phones let me knowthanks
_________________________________________
Christiopher XXXXXX
Retail Sales Representative
Yikes. Now that is a marketing disaster. No punctuation. No capitalization. No spell checking. Plus, the rep doesn’t even empathize with me. I took the time to write it. Clearly the rep didn’t take any time to write back (I hope). Why would I seeks this rep’s help with selecting a new phone?
The video below is by far the greatest commercial ever for a mobile home liquidation company. I’m not sure it’s effective, but at least people are talking about it. The Cullman Liquidation commercial has received over 2 million views on YouTube.
These days General Motors’ advertising is obnoxious. In GM’s new ad campaign Ed Whitacre boasts that GM has payed back their loan five years ahead of schedule, with interest! I can only assume that the commercial is aimed at brainless morons because GM’s claim is insulting.
Neither the ad nor the press release mentioned that GM repaid its government loan with other government money, or that U.S. taxpayers could lose money on the roughly $50 billion they still have invested in General Motors.
In a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said the repayment “appears to be nothing more than an elaborate TARP money shuffle.”
Here’s the video of the ad. I want to pull my hair out every time I see it because in a roundabout way the American taxpayer is paying for this stupid thing.
The sheer audacity by GM to run this ad is astounding. The first time I saw it I couldn’t believe my eyes. After watching it I will do everything I can to avoid purchasing or leasing a GM car. I drive a Buick now so it’s not like I need much convincing. The ad reminds of the Saturn campaign from last year.
So much for “we’re still here” because General Motors later announced the end of Saturn, which really doesn’t affect anyone except for Club Soda. At the time it was a bold ad campaign to insist that Saturn was alive and well. What’s going on with Saturn? Let me tell you what’s going on with Saturn. They’re going out of business. The idea that GM is “too big to fail” is ridiculous. The sooner the company goes out of business the better off the American taxpayer will be.
16 year old Canadian Justin Bieber wears a dog tag because it’s apparently cool
I don’t know who Justin Bieber is, I wouldn’t know him if I ran into him at a Gamestop store, and it doesn’t really matter. Bieber fits perfectly into the David Cassidy pop circuit. There’s nothing wrong with that. The only reason I’m writing about Justin Bieber is because the title of his latest album reminds me of everything wrong with corporate marketing.
Bieber’s debut album was titled My World. What clever title did the brilliant marketers come up with for his second album release only one year after his debut? The answer: My World 2.0. They pulled this straight from the marketing jargon bin. Damn you marketing nonsense! Can we kill this trend once and for all? They might as well have called the album iBeiber, but I’m sure Apple would have sued them.
2.0 is the jargon that won’t go away. It cranked into high gear with the idea of Web 2.0. Now it seems like when every marketing department of ad agency runs out of ideas they trot out a 2.0 at the end of the product. There’s Classroom 2.0, Business 2.0, Gas 2.0, Green 2.0, Domino’s Pizza 2.0, Marketing 2.0… the list goes on and on and on. How about Originality 2.0? Instead of just beating a term to death why not come up with a new idea? Nowhere is this more prevalent than in the seemingly endless reboots of movies.
Movie reboots used to mean “remakes.” This kind of made sense. A movie made in 1938 could be remade because the audience wasn’t familiar with the story. A more cynical person might even argue that the modern audience isn’t even aware that the 1938 version of the film is far superior than the pale imitation. Unfortunately, it’s becoming common place to “remake”, or reboot, movies less than a decade old.
The last Spiderman movie came out in 2007, and there’s already a plan to “reboot” the franchise. I guess this kind of makes sense if the franchise is terrible (see: Batman and Robin), but the three recent Spiderman movies were very well received. Large corporations suffer from the same fate as all large bureaucracies. They’re unable to innovate, they’re stuck in the past, and they’re reluctant to change.
The main reason this type of marketing bothers me is because it’s lazy. Coming up with new ideas is difficult. Many times it’s just easy to slap on a My World 2.0 sticker and call it a day. It didn’t matter what Justin Bieber called his second album; it was always going to be a success. The title suggests that type of thinking is exactly behind the uninspired name.
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