If you're interested in hearing some of the most twisted, blubber-filled blather explaining and defending PayPerPost, the service that pays bloggers to write positive posts for advertisers with questionable disclosure, you'll love this interview Jason Calacanis did with PayPerPost CEO Ted Murphy. To hear Murphy say he has no problem reading a blog that contains paid posts that aren't disclosed as such and try to attach some kind of logic to it is one of the saddest moments in marketing history. PayPerPost has been a laughable business model from its start and to hear Murphy try to justify it is just painful and offensive. It's an affront to what limited credibility marketing still has in the eyes of people. Lines are already blurred enough and Murphy, it seems, wants lines to disappear completely.
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No, Bank of America (and all other financial institutions for that matter), my account information is not enclosed in this letter. In case you hadn't read your own mail before sending, what's contained inside this letter is not my bank statement but rather yet another offer for me to consolidate debt, spend more money on a vacation and create even more debt by writing a check against my credit card account to spend frivolously on things I don't want or need.
Perhaps direct mail guru Bob Bly can put my mind to rest. Has it become permissible for the practice to mislead, lie and misinform as standard practice? I never created email that lied and for years I've ignored this idiocy. I can't any longer. It's bad enough Bank of America requires you to have a degree in accounting to figure out how much you actually owe on your overdraft account. Now they want you to go deeper into debt with these idiotic monthly offers. Yes, of course, I ignore all of them but after 24 months of me not responding, you think they'd want to save a stamp or two. Oh wait, direct mailers don't care about the wasted 98 percent of people who ignore their offers.They only care about the two percent that respond. Silly me.
It seems $50 million dollar marketing decisions can now be made on the basis of winning or losing a newspaper's ad popularity contest. Yes, that's right. CareerBuilder has placed its account in review because its ads did not make a top ten appearance in USA Today's Super Bowl ad poll, a tiny survey based on just a few hundred people with absolutely nothing to do with whether or not an ad affected sales.
Cramer-Krasselt President Peter Krikovich is pissed. Livid. Dumfounded. And steaming mad and tells Advertising Age he responded to CareeBuilder's opening a review based on the poll by asking, "You have to be fucking kidding me, right?" The agency has resigned the account and will not participate in the review.
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Is it just us or has this PayPerPost thing gone to far? PayPerPost is the company that pays bloggers to write positive posts about a brand. Now the company has launched an affiliate program that promises to pay other bloggers recruit other bloggers and pay them to link to the posts written by the original PayPerPost bloggers. Let's see if we can get this straight. PayPerPost is going to pay bloggers to link to other blogger's content, for which the sole reason of its existence was cash changing hands. Is anyone else having a WTF moment about this right now? Have these PayPerPost people lost all sense of reality? There are so many things wrong with this on so many levels.
Adrants reader Marcos Rozen, editor of the Brazilian AutoData, sent us this scan of a Chevrolet ad that appeared on page two of the February 5 issue of Automotive News. In the upper right hand corner of the ad, interlocking metal rings are hanging from a fence. One has to wonder how an ad with imagery so similar to a competitor's logo can make it through the lengthy approval process without being caught. We're thinking someone caught some serious shit for this and furious calls were made to Automotive News asking the magazine to yank the ad. At least we hope so. It'd be sad to think any brand would allow this to happen.
Copyranter gives a quick review of a recent YKK zipper ad which has a visual of zippers tricked out to look like spiders and the tagline, "Fashionable by Nature." His conclusion? "OK, I fucking HATE 'Fashionable by Nature.' Lazy fucking line. We'd have to agree and would also add associating spiders with zippers is just going to make people suffer through a fit of arachnophobia every time they touch their zipper. Zippers. Spiders. Who's "creative" brain did this come out of?
For pseudo-scientists still toting the efficacy of subliminal advertising, we bring you Hypno Marketing, an Australia-born method for turning even the most cynical of purchasers into brand evangelists for life. All they need is a few hours with said consumer.
"Hypno-marketing is not dangerous nor is it evil," says general manager Gavin Hawke. "Hypnosis and marketing use similar techniques to motivate people into a particular behavioural pattern. We cannot remove the free will from people but through our re-programming we believe we can control the individuals' decision making process."
Well, if hypnosis can get people to stop smoking, why wouldn't it work for marketing? And we're sure consumer-wannabes will be breaking the doors down at marketing evangelist hypnosis seminars. Who wouldn't want to be further cannibalized by every ad they see?
Apparently, the backlash over the Snickers Super Bowl commercial in which two men end up kissing after eating a Snickers bar from opposite ends was too much for the company to take and, as a result, the candy maker has taken down the commercial's accompanying website, afterthekiss.com. Typing in the URL simply redirects to the Snickers site.
While we liked this spot purely for its shock value, there's a faintly high probability this will have a very real negative affect on sales. Can you imagine the looks one will now receive from the checkout clerk when they buy a Snickers bar? That's just way too much snickering for most people to take and there's plenty of other perfectly good candy choices with far less embarrassment attached to them.
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The Army/Ad Council Boost Up effort skyrockets in our ratings of deserved abuse with this awkwardly-phrased, melodramatic, grammatically awful and typo-ridden explanation for Boost Up's mission.
We're sure they're sincere in suggesting that inside every one of us is a graduate. But clearly a high school graduate does not a good editor make. Well, guess that's what the military - er, college - is for.
If memory serves, after 9/11, wasn't it the French who sort of dragged their feet and made things difficult for the countries trying to tally together against Bin Laden? If so, that might explain this ad for French tree hugger site Defi Pour La Terre which thought it would be witty to transform the image of two trees into the twin towers burning on that fateful day. All to somehow equate the value of a tree to the value of a human life.
We not sure any amount of time passed makes this sort of thing OK. Then again, we're American. We knew people on Flight 93. The French? Well, perhaps they didn't know anyone who died that day or just feel Americans can't keep their hands out of other countries' issues. While the latter may be true, mocking a world event such as 9/11, at least for now, is still in very bad taste. And the French are supposed to know about taste, right?
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