It’s Friday - the day of the week when many of us like to surf the Web or the email inbox for a small distraction before the weekend starts. So I figure it’s as good a day as any to share another example of Marketing WITHOUT Meaning…

This week I didn’t have to look hard to find something provocative to write about. Despite multiple layers of spam protection that often leaves clients’ messages sitting in “mailMAX” purgatory alongside come-ons for male enhancement products, a sales message with multiple attachments made it through unscathed from an individual at Xipto.com. Here’s the unedited pitch:

Hi, Bob-

We have just completed our launch for Cincinnati Bell wireless subscribers.  Xipto allows cell phone users to choose messages to play out when they receive incoming calls.  The format is a 25 second mp3 clip that is introduced by a two-second ‘Your friend supports the following message.’ The messages are about brands, causes, events, or passions — messages that are relevant to reflective [huh?] of the individual cell phone subscribers.

We just started marketing Xipto last week, and already hundreds of CBW subscribers have signed up to endorse messages and those messages are playing out to their incoming callers.

Here are a few links and tools that you can explore, along with our press release below.  We would like to present Xipto to you next week — might you be free on Wednesday, September 18 at 9:30 a.m. I promise you’ll see the potential of Xipto as an innovative marketing tool.

Thanks very much.

Jill (not the real name)”

The gist, I figured, was that I could enable my phone to spam incoming callers with ad-supported messages of my choosing. Great! As a meaningful marketing practioner, I felt it was my duty to check out Xipto.com and the MP3 samples of what kinds of messages are “relevant to reflective” (per the email above) to people I might be calling. Here’s an example of what your friends could be hearing when they dial you up this weekend:

discover_biggs_prepend

The bonus: you can get paid every time a friend hears the relevant to reflective message you choose! Xipto doesn’t give specifics, but the website states that there is either a cash-back or donation option for the brands you market to your callers. Which makes one jump to quickly calculate the CPM on a year of phone calls - especially if incoming solicitor calls count!

Despite the Xipto sales rep’s emails and phone calls, I decided not to take the meeting. I cannot see how anyone would agree to sign up for or listen into such a service. One might note that more than 150 million numbers have been registered on the federal do-not-call list. More Americans have registered for this list than have registered to vote! The bottom line is that ad models that depend on a few seconds of interruption are increasingly driving people away entirely. Tests of pre-roll video ads show a 75% abandon rate. How many calls friends are you willing to lose in order to spread your “message” and make a nickel?

Once again, marketers of all types need to accept that unwanted advertising is a failed business model. In a separate iMedia article I read this week, Ted McConnell, interactive innovation director at Procter & Gamble, probably said it best: “I don’t think we will ever buy into a model that relies on personalized, unsolicited messages in a private addressable channel such as a telephone - and neither will consumers.” Amen.

I trust that I’m not the only one who was horrified to read in Advertising Age yesterday that the city of Venice, Italy, is opening up St. Mark’s Square for advertising. It marks the first time in the piazza’s 900-year history that advertising will grace this remarkable scene. Large electronic billboards will be placed on scaffolding, and the cash from the program is said to help pay for the restoration of the square.

Some predict that this will be another great opportunity for brands to connect with consumers. Mike Segrue, Global Chief Client Officer at out-of-home agency Kinetic Worldwide, captured the opportunity in saying:

The screens in St. Mark’s will be a great chance for high-end brands to reach a largely upscale audience… The careful vetting of copy and creative should allow Venice city council to retain some control and, of course, in the end important renovations will be completed. It is probably a relatively harmless necessary evil.”

Kudos to Segrue for his optimism and acceptance of the idea as a “necessary evil.” But I fear that this modest proposal will do much more harm than good. I believe that consumers are increasingly hostile to the way advertising has invaded nearly every square inch of eye space, and by bringing its touch to a 900-year-old historic landmark, advertising brands may find angry reactions instead of equity building.

I believe anger will come from an overall impression that “enough is enough” and that a line has been crossed. Recall the ill-fated attempt by McDonald’s to advertise on report cards. It was another example of a government body looking to embrace a “necessary evil” in order to pay the bills. But both local and national citizens rose against the plan and it was abandoned within weeks. Advertising in St. Mark’s Square will remind people who have visited the spot of a special time in their lives, and legions of future tourists will be disappointed to see the city of Venice sell out.

There are so many other ways that both government and marketers could renovate St. Mark’s without meaningless ad messages. I could see American Express or Visa create a global campaign about saving the square, raising money and contributing to the renovation. A small, tasteful plaque could be placed in the cobblestones to thank the brand and its members for their support. And it’s not too late! What a PR opportunity for a brand to propose this solution and come in and rescue the product from a necessary evil.

For now, though, we’ll have to chalk up another one for meaningless advertising and the continued belief that innovative advertising interruption will cure all ills. I leave you with a few of my favorite photos from my two visits to St. Mark’s Square.

(My wife, Stephanie, from 1999)

(Me while backpacking, from 1994)

(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.