We Stink

Marketing and advertising firms, that is.

I just spent some time looking at web sites of other marketing and ad firms, and came away with this though: this is just awful.

There are good ones, of course. But there are far too many that play music, talk, make the user sit bored while a Flash movie loads, rely in unintuitive navigation, or just are generally so in love with themselves that they expect the person sitting in front of the computer wondering "what are these folks about?" to sit and wait patiently for the show to start.

People don't do that. They just leave.

Talking to potential customers is supposed to be our business. It's scary that we're so bad about doing that with our own audience.

Really Bad Online Advertising

I understand that online ads are necessary if we want free news online.

BUT.

When I see this on the New York Times site:



I have to wonder if they get it. In case you can't tell - there are two ads there. The one on top is blocking the "close" button for the other ad which is blocking the story I wanted to read. So, I can't actually read anything on the page. Unless, I guess, I click the ad (which I'm not doing).

So it kind of defeats the purpose of even going to the Times web site.

Worst. Site. Ever.

Maybe not ever, but worst I've seen in a long time: this bit of horror from Purple Globe Communications. If you want to see almost everything you shouldn't do on a web site in one place, this is it. It relies completely on Flash, it plays annoying music all the time.

And worst of all, when you click on the links, the Flash navigation boops and beeps and things fly around to reveal pages of almost completely unreadable text.

So even if you put up with all the irritation, you can't figure out what they hell they do anyway.

It probably cost a lot of money, too.

The Bigger They Come...

A study showing that email open and click through decline as list size grows is no surprise to me. Generally, people do not unsubscribe from lists... they stop looking at the messages. Big, untargeted lists are likely to have this problem. The lesson: talking to a lot of people doesn't work as well as talking to the right people, because people are very good at tuning you out.

Armadillos in the Road

From 6x7 Reports, a great new term: armadillo marketing. It's hard on the outside, soft on the inside, meaning it looks cool, isn't well thought out, and is really appealing to the marketer's vanity. We've all seen it, and to be honest, we've probably all been involved in creating it. But we should be trying to avoid repeating our mistakes!

When Experts Screw Up

My local branch of the Business Marketing Association uses email to communicate with members and others interested in attending their events. That's smart. Unfortunately, they're not very good at it... and that's surprising, because it's an organization of marketing pros.

A few weeks ago I got an announcement of a special evening event via email. I couldn't make it to the event; I read the annoouncement, thought, "That sounds interesting, too bad I can't be there," and deleted the email.

Then, I got another email. And another. In fact, over the course of ten days, I got four absolutely identical messages. I stopped counting, but there were more after that - all exactly the same, except for the last one, which added some copy reminding me to register RIGHT NOW!! for the event.

Even more irritating, every time I opened one of these messages in Outlook, I got a message that they'd request a read receipt. I declined to send one. Intrusive, annoying, and unacceptable.

I want to be on their mailing list because I want to know about events. I actually replied to one of the messages asking if there was some reason they were sending me the exact same message every two or three days. No response.

Even worse: the email address in the message bounced.

If this is how a professional marketing association conducts itself, is it any surprise that so many companies manage to alienate and annoy customers with the email marketing?

I want to be on their list, because I want to know about events. But I'm tempted to just give up, because the stream of messages is just too much.

It's embarrassing when professionals do this bad a job. I have no idea who in the organization manages the email list, but I'm hoping to run into him or her at a future event, so I can politely comment on it.