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by Dave Morgan
, Featured Contributor,
October 14, 2010
Today is going to be one of those columns where I get on my soapbox. I just received a "Continuation Notice" invoice in the mail from a media trade newsletter company. To anyone in my office
without specific knowledge of our outstanding newsletter subscriptions (say, someone in accounting), one would think that this was a renewal notice. In fact, the mailing was very cleverly designed to
make you think it was a renewal invoice. It was not. Notices like this -- marketing like this -- make me mad. I suspect that they anger you, too.
That notice, together with the "bill"
for $1,195 to "continue" the newsletter service for the next year, was unsolicited. The sender's decision to label it as a "Continuation Notice" -- rather than as the solicitation it was --
could only be to prey upon the fact that some recipients would assume it was an ongoing or outstanding obligation of their companies and would pay it. Apparently, this happens quite a bit. I get a lot
of these notices, from many of the best publications in our industry.
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We also all get these: direct mail solicitations that look like official government mailings; emails seeking information
that aren't at the level of phishing, but certainly aim to obfuscate their actual intent; discount programs with negative option fees that are hidden, hard to notice and even harder to cancel; banner
and text ads designed to look like editorial content on the pages where they are presented; and similarly, print ads with advertorial content that is hard to distinguish from a publication's editorial
content.
OK. I have no problem with direct mail or commercial email or loyalty/discount programs or banner and text ads or print advertising. In fact, I love them. I have made my living off of
them for the better part of the past 20 years. Actually, it is because I hope to continue to make my living in marketing and advertising that I am upset about the deception that I regularly see in our
industry.
I realize that much of what I view as deception is quite successful, tried-and-true direct-marketing techniques that have developed over the past decades. Solicitors use them because
they work. However, we are now in a world of increasing transparency in all things, including marketing practices. The Internet makes "fact-checking" available in real time and on a personal level.
One of the few benefits of being bombarded by those hundreds of fraudulent emails is that the public has gotten even more suspect of that kind of "marketing." The tricks of old will not only be
found out, they won't work as well anymore. In the future, the value you can deliver will be much more important than how many folks you tricked into an offer.
Isn't it time we all did a
better job requiring all marketers to be straight with prospects they are soliciting? Shouldn't we start calling them out? What do you think?