Why People Hate Marketers, Continued

Because we, as a group, show them little or no respect.

Consider this article from MediaPost about the services offered by an outfit called FreshAddress.

E-MAIL MARKETING SERVICES COMPANY FRESHADDRESS, Inc., based in Newton, Mass., intends to release data today showing that in the last year, it's been able to find e-mail addresses for between 5 and 21 percent of customer names gleaned from offline mailing lists. The study, for which FreshAddress examined 100 million customer records, marks the first time FreshAddress has attempted to quantify its success in e-mail "appending," or tying e-mail addresses to names and street addresses. The average success rate for commercial senders was 12 percent for individuals and 16 percent for households. Efforts to find new e-mail addresses for customers who had changed accounts met with an 8 percent success rate.

Natalie Hahn O'Flaherty, the company's marketing director, said she believes the company--which has been in the e-mail appending business since 1999--is becoming more successful at matching offline and online information than in the past.

Still, the practice remains somewhat controversial, because many consumers recoil at the idea of being sent e-mails when they haven't volunteered their e-mail addresses. O'Flaherty stressed that when FreshAddress discovers consumers' e-mail addresses, the first message it sends asks whether the recipient would like to receive more e-mail communications.

So what? Is spam asking if you'd like more spam less annoying than the actual spam? If you did want email, wouldn't you have provided your address to the companies you wanted to hear from?

I'd recommend avoiding FreshAddress as if they were carrying the bubonic plague, because the essence of their business is ignoring what customers tells us about how they want to talk to us in favor of forcing ourselves on them. And that is just not how you start a productive customer relationship.

Consumers have plenty of opportunities to tell us what their email address is. If they decide not to, that's a pretty good sign that they do not want to hear from us in their inbox.

What's unfortunate is that the activities of companies like FreshAddress lead to calls for more legislation to control spam - which makes life harders for marketers that don't abuse their relationships with customers.

Trade Show Follies

This week I went to a trade show, and as always, I saw all kinds of terrible booth behavior. What astonishes me about it is that I've been hearing many of the same rules about successful show participation since the 1980s, but the same mistakes are repeated...

• Booth staff sitting in chairs looking bored and uninviting
• Booths crammed with the exhibitor's own staff, creating a wall of intimidation that prospective customers don't want to cross
• The lone staffer chatting on his mobile - don't interrupt him by asking for information about his products!

The ultimate "oh no they didn't" moment came at a very large exhibit belonging to a Brazilian company that wanted to play on their local culture. Not a bad idea, but they did this with hostesses wearing close to nothing who spoke little English who periodically took a break from talking to visitors to dance. That did get quite a crows (drool napkins, anybody?) but it's hard to think it was good for business. Most of the time their booth was just empty.

And on it goes...

Watch Where Your Name Goes

A recent report from the Center for Democracy and Technology found that ads from fairly reputable companies - Netflix, eHarmony, Club Med, and others - are being distributed via adware, software that installs itself on your computer and often causes all kinds of problems, and the advertisers aren't doing much about it. (Other advertisers, including Dell and AOL, are praised in the report for dealing with problem much better.)

The problem is that advertisers don't place all those ads themselves; big advertisers farm things out to ad brokers and online advertising companies that may or may not be doing things properly.

Ultimately, though, that doesn't matter - from the point of view of a user who got some kind of nasty adware on their machine because of a Netflix ad, it's Netflix who's the villain.

The comments from the Keith Smith, the CEO of 180solutions.com, one of the companies that plants this stuff on consumers' PCs, are fascination. They appear to be one of these outfits that gets your permission to put stuff on your machine by burying the details in copy that most people won't ever find or read.

The report found that advertisers sometimes are unaware that their ads have been installed with software. But Keith Smith, 180Solutions' chief executive, said his company explicitly tells consumers that its free software contains advertisements.

"We object to the overall premise that consumers are duped into installing our software," Smith said. "It's no different from what's on television. People are paying for this content by agreeing to some ads."

His company's web site is equally fascinating.

180solutions is about giving users a free content experience on the Internet, while at the same time fueling an economy where content creators, web publishers and advertisers of any size can make money with time-shifted paid search.

Through 180solutions' programs, consumers gain free access to a large catalog of entertaining and informative content sponsored by time-shifted paid search. Our applications offer web publishers and content creators a legitimate and flexible means to monetize all types of content, including games and videos, and advertisers increase their reach with new and highly targeted inventory.

First of all, anyone who uses the word "monetize" is shady in my opinion. The site talks at great length about "time-shifted paid search" but never explains what that is. A Google search on the term produces no illumination. My guess - and I'll have to go with my guess, because 180solutions has declined to explain what they're doing - is that "time-shifted paid search" means putting some software on your machine that does some kind of searching on its own as a means of manipulating search engine results for their clients. In other words, they simultaneously place annoying ads, screw with people's computers, and manipulate search engines, making them less useful for users. Nice business.

I could be wrong, but since the company doesn't explain what they do, there's no way to know. (If anyone from the company would care to explain, I'll write about it here.)