Bait & Switch
Remember our discussion about blog advertising last year? I just got a doozy today. I was contacted by [company that shall remain nameless] this afternoon with an offer of a couple free tickets to see Zack and Miri Make a Porno. The email straight up says: “[w]e would like to offer you two free tickets to the movie screening.” Hey, fun, right? I like Kevin Smith movies. I’d be willing to blog about it. So I wrote back to claim the tickets… only to be told that instead, I’d have to register with their blog advertising service and submit a contest entry to possibly win them. Uh, what? I went from feeling like a special, hand-picked “blog personality” to being just another googled email address. I wrote back saying that I didn’t appreciate being spammed. The sad thing is, when I checked out their service I actually recognized a few of the blogs I read regularly. I was actually thinking about signing up. I also forwarded the request to my boss, with a note that this type of non-traditional advertising might be what we need for some of the mobile projects we have coming up. Instead, I had to send him correction ten minutes later saying that I was wrong, that this company definitely Doesn’t Get It. How disappointing.