Unclear on the Concept

I don't think this company understands the competing concepts here. Absolutely free means without any expense incurred. Just pay $4.95 is not absolutely free. I'm sure they believe they are being consistent but, at the end of the day, they are not providing something for free, they are charging people $5 for it.

Absolutely free would mean they are giving it away AND paying the cost to ship it to you.

They could offer a $5 discount on the first order to make it closer to free but it still wouldn't be Absolutely Free. I hate it when marketers lie.

Whoa

This is funny and wrong and goofy and still kind of appealing to my inner ten year old all at once.

What a Deal

The tv just advertised the Topsy Turvy Tomato Planter which I've had my on for a while since I saw how well it worked at a pal's house.

They even had it at a good deal of $20 for two. But then, in the small print, they charge $16 for the shipping. That's 80% of the purchase price being added on to ship the things.

And there is absolutely no way, no how it costs even $8 to ship.

I hate companies that think people are stupid enough to fall for it. Almost as much as I hate that people are stupid enough to fall for it.

Wal-Mart Gets Faced by Facebook

Facebook Users Hijack Wal-Mart's Roommate Style Page

Woops, guess they didn't really think that one all the way through either. Just like hiring a PR firm to make a "grassroots" blog about how great a company they are.

Until Wal-Mart stops treating the web like a bunch of fools, they'll continue to get pwned. Which is, of course, fine by me. I like seeing them look like the terribly uncool trying to come off as cool.

Nice to know that Facebook's got a vocal group happy to expose corporate megaliths for the discriminatory and exploitive juggernauts they are. There's no reason to shit all over the world, you can make a decent buck and be a conscientious corporation too. Yes, your margins may shrink in the short term but you'll make far, far more longterm.

And they'd shut me up, which would, also of course, be fine. I have no axe to grind with Wal-Mart, all they have to do is change how they operate their business from supply and manufacturing to employees and customers. Revamp it from the bottom up or top down and I'll be the first in line to applaud.

Dear Domain Listing Service Corp.

aka Bottom Feeder Search Engine Submission Corp.

I wanted to thank you ever so much for your kind offer to help me promote a website I got as a freebie when I signed up with the much maligned 1&1 Internet Services. A website I did nothing with, never even opened it up in a browser. And it expired many months ago.

Thank you ever so much for offering to submit it to the 25 major search engines for the low, low price of only $65 for the year.

I can only imagine the misdirected and worthless traffic you would try to send my way and call it results.

Thanks but no thanks. I can submit my own sites to search engines (almost all of them have easily findable pages to do this and, really, is there any other search engine besides Google? no, I didn't think so).

What The? Who're You in My Buddy List?

I thought it was odd when my laptop came back from repairs with two or three unknown "Buddies" in my iChat buddy list. Two were people and one was a company. How or why they got there was a mystery and kind of annoying. But it was easy enough to delete them and move on.

That was several weeks ago. When I fired up iChat this morning, there was another new Buddy that I'd never seen before. For a company with IM services to sell me.

While the person who came up with this invasive marketing technique probably got congratulated by the higher ups for such an innovative way of getting into the buyer's face, as an end user, I think they should get strung up and yanked apart by horses.

And, perhaps more importantly, it won't friggin' work. Do you really think I'd be limp enough to actually buy your crap after you forced your way onto my computer? Ha.

I'm a fan of marketing done right, this ain't it.

Marketing for Failure

Techdirt: How To Make Being Put On Hold Even More Annoying: Pipe In Some Ads because people waiting for customer service (or emergency tech support) really, really, really make for good potential up-sell customers to blast ads at.

Actually, they don't. At all.

When I need tech support and I'm put on hold while awaiting the next available operator, I cannot adequately express how deeply annoying getting sales pitch after sales pitch for additional services is. If I'm already stressed about my product being broken then there is absolutely zero chance I want to be marketed to for more junk.

I'm sure there's a percentage of people that will buy this way but I can assure you that I will never be one of them and I'll also register my complaint with the sales pitch while on hold as revenue maker model, it is rude. And rude business models deserve to fail.

There are ads almost everywhere, why do advertisers feel so compelled to keep pushing them in our faces? They must understand that humans reach a saturation point beyond which any further targeted marketing is useless, the target has eiher gone to buy the product (which won't stop the ads) or he, like me, has become immune to the non-stop barrage by tuning the vast, vast majority of it out.

Or, I also tend to analyze ads and tear them apart for their tawdry use of manipulative techniques to gain customers.