(This is a guest post from our ace Director of Business Development, Jonathan Richman. Check out his usual blogging home at Everyone But You).

For many of us, it’s pretty straightforward to see when a marketing program provides real meaning. However, to understand even more about Marketing with Meaning, I’ve found it helpful to look at just the opposite: Marketing with No Meaning. You see this every day, all around you. It’s the display ads with no useful information, the telemarketer interrupting your dinner, the pop-up ads that flash enough to give you a seizure, and, of course, all the spam filling our email boxes with strange offers from Nigerian government officials seeking to enhance our bank accounts and other offers seeking to enhance, ahem, other areas.

So, contrast how you feel about these types of marketing efforts with how you react to some of the truly meaningful work that immediately comes to mind (and that will be highlighted on this site). It’s the Marketing with No Meaning that makes our jobs as marketers that much harder. It makes consumers want to use TiVo, Adblock, and generally shut off anything we have to say. It makes it harder because when you have something truly meaningful, people are already predisposed to ignore it. That’s why Marketing with No Meaning efforts upset me the most. They’re making me work harder every single day for the same results. I hate that.

An example of Marketing with No Meaning? I’ve got plenty, but one was called to my attention yesterday by Bob Garfield of AdAge. You can read his rather scathing criticism on your own, but some of the more interesting quotes go like this:

• “What should we think when a leading national advertiser borrows a marketing strategy from the drug trade?”
• “…explicitly incites its shadowy network of crap eaters not only to perpetrate mischief but to document their petty crimes on video…”
• “Can you see how this is all destined to lead to litigation? Or worse? Can you see how ethically bankrupt it is…?”

Wow. Wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of that, right? The “victim” of his rant is orangeunderground.com, a site supported by Cheetos encouraging RAoCs… Random Acts of Cheetos. Well, just by the name, that sounds nice… Cheetos is encouraging teens to help old ladies across the street or pick up trash at the local park. Not quite. No, some of their ideas are a bit more, um, anti-establishment. At the top of this page is one from their Recipes for RAoCs that you can download. Yet another idea includes going to a laundromat and tossing a bag into a random clothes dryer (the one drying the whites).

A few things about this whole concept… first, I’ll acknowledge that this entire idea might (MIGHT) appeal to the target audience for this product, which I’d guess is men 14 to 30. They like vandalism and, as the site encourages, “sticking it to the man.” However, I prefer to call it something else: “Being a d*ck.” It’s not actually funny, it’s not terribly smart or creative, and it’s not something that unique. Encouraging kids to pull pranks isn’t anything new and, as far as pranks go, these are pretty boring and old. I suppose they didn’t think of filling a paper bag with Cheetos, lighting it on fire, setting it on someone’s doorstep, and knocking. Watch the hilarity ensure… come on.

Sometimes Marketing with Meaning includes offering some form of entertainment to people alongside your message. You can offer a funny diversion in someone’s day and sell your product. That could be Marketing with Meaning. However, implicit in this is that, while you provide Meaning to one group of people, you don’t “stick it” to other group. Consider Cheetos next promotion where they encourage kids to siphon gas from strangers’ cars to help them save for college. Great for the kids (assuming they aren’t arrested), not so great for the car owner who’s out about $1,200 to fill his tank these days.

It’s OK to have fun with your marketing… I’d encourage it. A key thing to remember, though, is that in catering to your target audience, you’re not destroying the rest of the world around you. There’s no doubt in this case (should anyone decide to care) that the repercussions overall on the brand will be negative. The target group may love it, but when the wrong prank is played on the wrong person, PepsiCo., maker of Cheetos, is going to have more problems than success stories. It seems to me that the only way this promotion could increase sales is that some people might try to buy enough Cheetos to fill a car. If enough people do that, it’s got to cause a lift in sales. Oh yes, and it takes a lot of Cheetos to put a handful in every dryer, in every laundromat, in the entire country.