When I buy a Mars Bar (admittedly not that often these days) the newsagent doesn’t pester me with weekly phone calls about the other chocolate bars I might be interested in. And when I get off a bus I’m not concerned that the rest of my life will be littered with visits from the driver, asking if I’d like another journey at some point.
But when I buy absolutely anything on the internet I then receive regular emails telling me about new offers and other products from the place I shopped at.
And that would be fine if I had deliberately ticked an opt-in box, expressing my further interest in what these sites have to offer, but that never happens. I know if never happens because I’m always surprised to receive yet another email pointing out that it’s Valentine’s Day, the perfect occasion to buy some Lego.
This morning I voted for a friend’s card design on some site. Of course they asked for my email address and IMMEDIATELY sent me some spam which began with ‘thank you for signing up to our newsletter’. But I didn’t, and now I just feel negatively about the company in question.
Of course it’s an effective marketing tool that probably brings in more money than pissed off customers, but would it be so awful to have the chance to opt in instead of having my email address used as permission for constant bother?
I literally have no idea what that means, but it’s great that some cider-guzzling tramp had a good go at explaining it to me.
If ‘now’ is a good time, what about that good time I had several years ago after one too many margaritas when I jumped into a bin in St John’s Wood High Street with my pants on my head? Why is now a better time than that?
Answers on a postcard.
UPDATE: Apparently last September was also a good time…
Interesting theory that throws up a couple of interesting questions:
Does Sir John believe his own agency’s creative output has deteriorated in recent years?
If there’s been a problem with advertising getting to grips with new technology, how come truly great TV work was still being a produced a long way into the digital revolution? How come advertising has suffered most in the last five years and not the ten before that?
Why did the person who wrote the article think that BBH produced the Pregnant Man ad?
And ‘…one of the other problems I have today is people have retreated to the edges of advertising. You know, they’re happy to do some small little campaign somewhere or they’re doing something on the net that hardly anybody sees and they’re getting awards for it and everybody’s cheering. But they’re not changing the way people feel or think.’
If you’d like read about it you can click on either of the two links above.
I’ll just reprint one of his most salient points:
It wasn’t long ago that the agency business was the province of independent entrepreneurs. In the 1980′s Y&R was the largest agency in the U.S. with a 1 1/2% share of the US advertising market.
Today, four global holding companies control over 70% of the advertising in the U.S. We don’t believe this is a good or healthy thing.
