This week two notable communications organizations have used our comments as a dumping place for their handmade Spam. How thoughtful of them.
Today’s “perp” left nothing but a URL in our comments. Earlier in the week a staffer at a Midwestern agency used our comments to blatantly promote a project near and dear to him. In both cases the unwanted comments were deposited in threads that had nothing whatsoever to do with their particular plug. They merely dropped them off in our top slots, within easy reach of their scroll wheel.
Concurrent with this development, there is a McKinney copywriter posing as a doctor on a blog and taking stands like this in the bloatosphere:
I expected a vigorous scientific debate, not a slobbering geekfest over the ethics of advertising and marketing on the web (How oxymoronic can you get?)
So here we are, awash in abuses by professional communicators–people who ought to know better, but do not. When The Hughtrain spouts off about how Madison Ave. does not, and likely never will, get blogs, I have countered, “They will!” Well, I can see Hugh is closer to the truth than I am at this juncture.
My question is, what’s so hard about it? Why all the difficulty and stumbling idiocy? Is it on purpose or merely the wanton byproduct of ingrained cultural arrogance?
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I think the problem is arrogance. advertising is essentially bullshit. and what we’re seeing is advertising people clumsily trying to transfer their “skills” to media where they are neither welcome nor appropriate. hence all these “hoaxes” and “stunts” that so delight us adfolks but go completely unnoticed by a society that has moved on.
I guess I underestimated what a bad habit interruption marketing really is.
The failure of agencies to get blogging reminds me of the boardroom scene in Crazy People, the movie where Dudley Moore is an agency creative. The late, great J. T. Walsh is in the boardroom demanding his creatives come up with ‘something honest’. None of them could, of course, though one of them does sheepishly tell his boss, ‘If I could have till Tuesday, I might be able to come up with something pretty honest by then, sir.’
What is more shocking, David, is not that the agencies don’t “get” blogging, but that they hire such stupid people who can’t even investigate the appropriateness of blogiquette—which is not that far from everyday civility in modern office correspondence. What are their HR departments doing, and should clients be paying that much money for this level of incompetence?
Then again, I trained as a lawyer, so I shouldn’t act surprised. People will pay a lot for something that has all the value of expired beef jerky.
Spam Blogs are Splogs, Comment Spam is Spomment, how about trackback spam? Spamback or Trackspam? Please vote here.
Is it on purpose or merely the wanton byproduct of ingrained cultural arrogance?
wanton byproduct or worse, wanton product
still you linked to them. so it works, by the primitive criteria they’re going to use