Advertising Not Wanted Here

To make extra cash, I distributed advertising fliers when I was in school. It was not as lucrative as doing the paper route here, believe me. Pennies to a flier and I had to put it in the mail boxes. In Italy they are locked inside condominiums and apartment buildings.

On my bike, sometimes in the cold rain, I would carry pounds of paper from block to block. Then I would need to park and lock the bike, ring a bell to ask someone to open the door to the building and then go in and insert in each mail box.

Think about the coupon booklets and supermarket fliers we get here in our mail boxes once a week -- except for the mail service there was so poor and expensive (compared to cheap labor like me), that we did it manually.

Many years later, they fitted plastic or metal boxes outside buildings so that the fliers could be inserted there -- no doubt building security became a concern on top of people becoming annoyed at having their mail box filled with fliers. I recently passed a building on my way from center city Modena and saw this sign posted. What it says is: "Publicity is not wanted here". What it means is: no junk in my mail box. Where can I find the sign to post on my email box?

Things have changed a great deal since the beginnings of fliers and publicity. Yet, we insist on doing things just the same. In The Big Switch, which I reviewed recently, Nicholas Carr talks about the problem of spam. By the end of 2006, an estimated 94 percent of all emails sent over the Internet were spam, up from 38 percent. That's when Gates made his prediction that spam would be solved at the World Economic Forum in Davos just two short years earlier. One spam-tracking firm reported that on any given day as many as 85 billion spam messages are being sent.

Anywhere from ink and toner sales, to health coverage, offers to time shares and to meet the person of your dreams, online pharmacy deals, investment advice, etc. The cost/opportunity ratio must still clearly be in favor of doing it, someone benefits, or it would not be growing at such a rate. This kind of publicity not wanted here, we say. Is there a place for advertising? I think there is, but it must be reinvented.

It's like with everything else. Lazy ends up dominating the marketplace. Lazy ends up clogging mail boxes, phone lines, job applicant stacks. Lazy is the scraping of good content online. Lazy is all the noise that clutters your signal. What's the opposite of lazy? Doing the work. Learning about your audience, responding to what they find valuable, being responsive as your customers define it.

Comments

[Joe Cascio]

The days of open mailboxes may be over. Social networks have shown us that pure opt-in, whitelist-only messaging works. If you're not on my "friends" list, you don't get to send me messages. Period.

[Valeria Maltoni]

You and I talked about this at some length when I floated the idea of opt-in email, which I still like very much. I agree, the days of unsolicited contacts are quite over.

I must get at least a half dozen unsolicited sales calls every single day. For the emails the number goes well into the double digits.

1. I could never get my job done if I started sifting through that.

2. They are by design broad, unspecific, unhelpful, dart in the night messages that I have no time for.

Focus on getting references. Focus on honing your message to be specific and pertinent. Put more energy into reaching me the right way, vs. into reaching everyone the same way.

[Tim]

Spam has an upside. I really enjoy this website which is "poetry" created from spam email subject lines only.

http://spam-poetry.com/

I really like it. Most have a dark, sinister undertone. Now and then you see a line that was in your own inbox.

[Ricardo Bueno]

I've recently started reading "Permission Marketing" by Seth Godin.

It's very relevant to how we operate our marketing campaigns!

For some of us (or at least in my industry) it involves email follow ups and pertinent newsletters. Right? But is a client really reading them? I would venture to say "NO" unless we have explicit permission from our audience and they are therefore expecting something.

It's like what Joe said above!

[David Alston]

Great post Valeria. I've often been amazed how little spam I get inside Facebook. In fact a friend just got their first one today. While in general I'm not a big fan of walled gardens the whole idea of self-policing and zero tolerance in Facebook certainly is a great thing when it comes to email. Wouldn't it be neat if we could somehow take the best of this system and apply it to general email. Maybe someday. Heaven on earth :-)

[Roger von Oech]

Interesting observations. Spam doesn't bother me as much now as it used to. I get about 200+ per day but my filters tend to take care of most of it.

What bugs me, though, are the spam faxes that come to my business over-night. They cost me toner and paper. I guess I could always turn off the machine, but some international clients still use faxes.

[Valeria Maltoni]

@Tim -- ah, ah, ah it made me think of some of the spam I get... and I'm a girl ;-)

@Ricardo -- it's amazing how people make assumptions. For example, I still lead a networking group of readers of Fast Company magazine. We have 500+ members in Philadelphia. Each new member who has a newsletter signs me up for it, assuming it's alright. Imagine how much stuff I get without choosing to.

@David -- no, the spam inside Facebook is from your friends, which is much worse, and subliminal in that they collect a ton of info on your behavior -- both bad. I don't log on anymore. There was one member of my group of "friends" who signed up for every group she could find and invite all her friends. 3-4 emails from Facebook because of her alone. I wrote about opt-in email in my Web 3.0 post there on the sidebar under "Timeless", if you're interested in reading a scenario.

@Roger -- I remember when we had those faxes with thermal paper and in the morning we would come in the office to find the rolls of paper all over the floor -- a lot being advertising. Ugh!

[gianandrea]

Valeria, you took a lot of pictures from your latest trip to Italy..

I agree with you on the subtle and, indeed, worse way of Facebook (to say one) to spam our profile.
Yesterday I've got a message from a friend with a funny application. To install the app, I should have involve ten friends. This sucks.

I understand that the guys from Facebook have to show that they can make money out of it but this is the worst way to do it.

I posted yesterday on my blog a comment about an interview with a Facebook's vp (source: Fast Company): at the end of the article, I had the strong feeling that they do not know how to monetize in a honest way.

[Valeria Maltoni]

And more photos to come ;-) Stealth never works long term. It is much better to be up front. That's why I completely lost interest in Facebook.

We discussed that article when we spoke about "Facebook: Brands Guilty by Association?". It seemed all great, but they were telling only part of the story.