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.


Important Note

This site features content going all the way back to 2000. The posts you’ll read reflect my views and writing style at the time. While I have gone back to clean up a few of them, I think it’s important not to sanitise too much. This site is a record of who I am and how I’ve grown. Any blog post written years ago may not reflect who I am today, nor how I would write about the same topic today.