::scr Marketing, Spam, Whatever

[simon wistow]

I'm on a mailing list called EGR - Entropy Gradient Reversal - which is Chris
'CluetrainRage Boy' Locke's mailing lists.

He's just released a book called 2Gonzo Marketing - Winning through worst
practices" [0] which seems pretty interesting, is remarkably similar in tone,
style and content to some of my more, err, passionate rants and ... was
selling fuck all ...

Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 11:36:52 -0600
To: "EGR-Topica (E-mail)" <egr@topica.com>
From: Christopher Locke <clocke@panix.com>
Subject: EGR: In Which I Yell At You A Lot

[snippage]

The book must be taking off like a rocket, right? No.
Not right. The book is in the shitter. At the moment:

   Amazon.com Sales Rank: 7,533

True, things could be worse. But if this book doesn't hit -- and hard
-- I'm fucked. Some of you have bought it, for which I am profoundly
grateful. But "some" in this case translates to something like 2% of
EGR's 5000+ readers, which is worse than many direct mail "campaigns."
It's depressing to think that spam is more effective than writing my
twisted little heart out to you indifferent pukes. So far this year,
my Amazon links have sold only 140 copies of Gonzo. And since many of
those sales represent people who never heard of EGR, the 2% figure is
certainly an overstatement of your Valued Support.


...

The rest of the mail (all 13k of it) basically went into a rant about why none
of the major reviewers were actually reviewing it - mostly because he'd pissed
off their parent companies in the book.

Any way, later we get ...

Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2001 18:14:34 -0600
To: "EGR-Topica (E-mail)" <egr@topica.com>
From: Christopher Locke <clocke@panix.com>
Subject: EGR: Spamthrax!

Valued Readers:

Damn, yelling at you guys is ***SO*** much fun! Remind me to do it
more often. I felt positively cleansed by the time I finished that
last rant. And effective too! Almost instantly, the stat leaped over
7,000 points. Current weather:

   Amazon.com Sales Rank: 169

Holy shit! See what I mean? The power of the net is awesome. Imagine
what would happen if your *average* marketing puke said -- oh yeah, ON
TV! -- "Buy the flipping product, you two-bit fuck!" Maybe I should
suggest this to Procter & Gamble. But it all comes down to street cred
in the end. P&G doesn't love you. You know I do.


...


which is nice :)

Anyway, it started getting me thinking about advertising again.

Currently I'm working for a games company. We make online and mobile games.
I'm doing a research project about the viability of 3G, j2me phones as a games
platform, but, at the moment, we sell marketing games. 

I did a few of these at $marketing_company before and they were quite
succesful in that they were an incentive for people to not only click through
to another site but also keep coming back.

Jo mentioned textual links being more effective than traditional banner ads,
presumably because people have become desensitised to banners and also
because experience dictates that, in general, when you click on a link you get
information but when you click on a banner you get advertising. The only
problem i can see is that people will start to associate links with marketing
instead of information - that you'll be afraid to click on a link in case it
goes to a brochureware site or something. Although I'm quite itred at the
moment so I'm probably rambling.

Google gets away with it by sticking their quick links up in a box on the side
(do they still do that? I've noticed that I haven't noticed any for a while)  

...

and this mail is gradually rambling off into nothing so I'm going to shut up
now ...

Simon




[0] http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0738204080/entropygradientr
    http://www.gonzomarkets.com


-- 
: "Don't worry," she said, seriously. "Most of the blood was someone else's."