Brunswick Media owner Mike Conaty recently appeared as a guest on the Rockstar Podcast Lite with host Lorenzo Araneo of Screaming Lunatic Multimedia, LLC.
One of my first jobs when I was fresh out of college was as a marketing assistant at a Sci/Tech publishing house. The main focus of the job was basically finding targeted direct mail lists in niche markets like organic chemistry, landscape management, wastewater treatment, and various human organ disease treatments. Exciting stuff, huh?
Procrastination is the Kryptonite to blogging’s Superman. We’re all guilty of it; you get caught up in the everyday business of running your business, and yet another day goes by and your poor, lonely blog sits idly by, neglected until you ignore it tomorrow.
Dear NYC Post-Production House:
I would address this to you by your company name, but of the three people who just called me (within 5 minutes) on your behalf, none could speak English well enough for me to understand. Not that I didn’t ask each of them to say the name of the company again; it’s just that they chose not to respond to my question, they just continued on with the script.
How can I put this delicately?
There really is no way to… err… Have you ever been or known a 10-year-old boy? (Or or a 40-year-old one?)
Ummm….. Well, there really isn’t anyway to be delicate about this one. If you follow the link below, you’ll see that it’s:
Harry Hoover from My Creative Team, Inc. twittered an innocuous little post:
Sometimes I can’t believe I get paid to do this: http://www.laughyourgasoff.com/
The only word I could come up with for my reaction was Gobsmacked. Yes, it is funny, and yes it should drive traffic to the site. I was gobsmacked by the guts it took to pitch this to the client, BernzOmatic, but even more gobsmacked at the guts of the BernzOmatic folks to OK the campaign.
So kudos to BernzOmatic, and to My Creative Team. Now, how can I pitch something like this to the folks at The Gutster?
Marketing is fun sometimes.
We’ve been using a great service called HitTail for the last year or so, which gives you a basic idea of where people are coming to your website from. It keeps track of the words and phrases people search for when they come across your site. One of the top phrases people search on is “Video Production Rates.” Lately though, I’ve seen that phrase replaced with “Cheap Video Production” or something to that effect.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted: it’s been a rough couple of months. My father was seriously ill for a couple of months, and passed away in Pennsylvania on October 5, 2005. Needless to say, between trips to PA, and his passing, some things had to slip, and BrunswickMediaBlog was one of them.
With all of the details to work out, there was one “professionally interesting/disturbing” thing that came to the forefront: companies trolling the obituaries to market to the families of the recently deceased. Now (in jest) I refer to myself as the “resident sleazy marketing guy” in my bio on the Brunswick Media Services website, but I had no idea how sleazy marketing could really get.
On my return back to New Jersey after the funeral, I had two (2) pieces of mail selling me “discount” headstones for my father’s grave. My name had appeared in my father’s obituary but not my address, the fine folks at BOTH of the discount headstone places had obviously found my name in the Star Ledger version of the obituary (my father spent most of his life here in NJ, so the obit ran here as well as in PA), found my address, and HAND ADDRESSED the envelope to send me their marvelous sales material. (**Note to the company that sent the postcard** “DO NOT PAYLESS…” should be “DO NOT PAY LESS”, two words not one.)
Another interesting/disturbing aside: I’ve received two of these direct mail pieces, my mother received one (from another company in PA), but my sister, who lives in PA has not received any. Does that mean that they target the son of the deceased and not the daughter? Perhaps they believe that, as a guy, I wouldn’t be as offended at their targeting practices. Maybe they just think that since I’m the guy, I’d be the one making all of the decisions.
Let’s review. These companies are:
- Opportunistic slime buckets who troll the obituaries
- Illiterate? (At best, they just need to proofread.)
- Sexist?
This is why everyone hates marketing people; they see opportunistic sleazebags like the monument folks, and paint everyone in the field with the same brush. I suppose it’s the same for lawyers, a couple of ambulance chasing slime bags ruin the reputation of an entire profession.
But as tasteless as the headstone peddlers’ tactics are, I’ve got one better. The day after the obituary ran in the paper, my mother received a letter in the mail. It was hand-written (in this very small, almost psychotic-looking handwriting from a member of a cult/church made famous by their members ringing doorbells and handing out magazines.) In the letter, the writer quoted liberally from the Bible about the dead coming back, blah, blah, blah… and suggested that my mother join the cult/church to save her soul. At the risk of offending some potential client, where do these people get off preying on the widow of a man who had only been gone for 2 days? I supposed the recently widowed are psychologically vulnerable at that point, and are relatively “easy pickings” for them. Make no mistake, these people are marketing their cult/church, and are every bit as sleazy as the monument folks, if not more.
Interesting/Disturbing Aside #3:
Brunswick Media Services LLC is the #40 link on Google, for the term “Sleazy Marketing”. Maybe this post will help boost us to the top ten!