What is the sleaziest marketing tactic you’ve encountered recently? Here are some of our favorite candidates:
- Spam – a perennial contender – GET RICH NOW! HOT SEX! (And no matter how sleazy or revolting the message might be, advocates of the constitutionally guaranteed right to invade other people’s privacy will be delighted to learn that internet service providers like Erols/Starpower are doing absolutely nothing to filter out unsolicited bulk mail.
- Computer Calls – No human being wants to be hung up on when interrupting people’s dinner with a marketing call, so brilliant marketers have automated the process – now when we answer the phone it’s a computer on the other end. And if we don’t answer the phone, the computers leave messages.
- Pop-Unders – That ad on your computer screen – where did it come from? Pop-up ads appear when you visit a site, so you know how the ad was generated, but users tend to instantly minimize the screens. So the current trend is to use “pop-unders” which appear, at some point, when you’ve left the site you visited – but its usually not obvious what site is generating them.
Note that all of these sleazy marketing tactics are aided by technology
I make it a point to notice the names of the advertisers in those incessant, annoying popup ads and I DO NOT purchase their goods or services…EVER! If they were to do away with those horrible popups, I may change my mind, but until then…NO THANKS!
The marketing tactic that most offends me is driven by that immutable imperative that drives the federal government: If you don’t know what to do, do anything because the American people are too stupid to see the smoke and mirrors. I give you the hype and nonsense about airport security. The airport security workers that I have seen, with very few exceptions, couldn’t find a rabid weasel if it was stuffed into their shorts. Either they should get serious about security or they should drop the pretense. The current system doesn’t fool anybody.
The tech heads always find ways to annoy us.
The whole industry was spawned by the failed Dot-Com
world, serves them right !!!
Go to the web and find a good tool to reduce these types
of attachments.
The telemarketers, well thier all a bunch of lousy F’s
There are plenty of things to rage about. From people who don’t know “their” from “there” or “they’re” to technology to sleazy marketing schemes. But even some of the non-sleazy marketing schemes are more than a bit annoying. Just yesterday I received mail from my auto insurance agent offering me a Platinum bank card, an airline offing me free miles if I would switch my long distance carrier to one I already use, a university (that I attended for only one semester) alum association that wanted to offer me life insurance and the list goes on and on. Why is it that each company has to “partner” with some other company make “special offers” when what consumers really want is a good product at a reasonable price and decent customer service who actually care about their customers?
The particularly insiduous version of pornsite come ons (pardon the pun) which leads with ‘I FINALLY FOUND YOU!!!’, ‘In reply to your inquiry’, those are just so blatant. Saddest is that if it didn’t work, they wouldn’t keep doing it! Another cute one in the body of these letters, usually following the premise of a ‘young, shy girl’ who just loves to ‘show everything in front of a webcam’ yada yada, is the comment somewhere that she ‘saw’ you in a chat room (how do you do THAT???) but was ‘too shy’ to talk to you then… So, how the hell did she get your email addy??? Bottom fishin’ sounds to me like. Just wish they’d get caught on their own hook. I’ve tried turning them in, but that only slightly soothes, as the places they claim to come from are simply a front.
1. Spam. Techies hate spam even more than most people: we’re the ones who have to deal with it clogging our servers. Blaming all techies for spam is like blaming George W. Bush for Bill Clinton’s sins. . .
2. Those damned computer calls. I have a trick to beat them. Look on the net for anti-telemarketing pages. Many have a sound file of that distinctive 3-tone sequence that tells you the number has been disconnected. Get the file, arrange for it to be the FIRST thing on your answering machine. When autodialers “hear” the tones, they automatically remove you from the list of numbers they dial. There’s also a piece of equipment that does it, the “Tele-Zapper”, but this solution is free, whereas the Zapper is about 50 bucks. . .
I object to the phenomenon of
unsolicited ‘pop-up’ ads.
An invasion of my privacy.
I read your “Marketing Sleaze!” outrage newsletter and I know of one item that was overlooked. It only affects AOL users however. Some person of the sort who sends spam discovered that its part of the design of the utility that handles instant messages that it is possible to insert a link into a message. So now many people get notices asking people if they want to recieve an IM from a screenname but if they accept instead of chatting with a person, they just see a text-only ad.
Live-calls, mostly from the telephone company (Bell Monopoly – as opposed to Mobility), and from Mastercard. They start their call with “And how are YOU today”. Being “live”, their calls are driven by incentived tenacity. They even talk minutes after you laid down the receiver (without hanging up) in order to pursue more interesting tasks at home, such as fishing an errant fork out of a sink garburrettor!
Beats the 99-cent come-on by far.
I am particularly outraged by all the porn advertising I get-hate it!!
Freedom of privacy in the U.S.A. is a forever on going
evolving situation. Telephones,T.V.,Internet, are
only some foundational forms used to tell other people who
we are and what we’re about without ever having come in contact with us. For example, by reading my response you have already figured out that that I have know idea what I’m talking about. . . . BUT THAT’S MY BUSINESS SO LEAVE ME ALONE!!!!
Wake up people… You whine that you don’t like advertising and most likely you’re sitting there wearing an Abercrombie T-shirt, Tommy jeans, and NIKE shoes… Give me a break! That’s the real outrage. If it wasn’t for advertising even this Web site wouldn’t be in business. Face it… Advertising is the engine to business as we know it. If people didn’t respond to all the “sleaze” you’re crying about, marketers wouldn’t be doing it. What’s the difference between a billboard along the roadway and pop-up ad on the Internet? It’s the price you pay for all of the “free” Web sites. The fact remains, nothing in life is really free. Someone has to pay–and if the price is simply hitting your delete button a few times a day, do the world a real favor, just do it!
I hate the telemarketers more than anyone. I feel very strongly that the phone is mine and they are intruding on my private devices. Where is the courts to protect us.
I would like to know how unsolicited pop ups come up on my browser. I understand how JavaScript from a page that I have requested can open a pop up. But the windows that I am currently getting happen even when my browser is not running. Somehow, something is starting IEXPLORE.EXE and then launching the popup. The HTML has something about a dialer popup. How can they do this? Thanks
You want to find out who’s spamming you? Trace the dollar. Find out who wants your money.
Here is where I’m at with the porn…I’ve set up an account for my young daughter and son (accounts they will never see). I’m saving all of those porn emails that come to those accounts with XXX pictures that are viewable even in just the preview pane. (Think about it…this stuff really does come to any children who may have an email address, ages 13 or younger to 18.)
The Internet is still wild country. I hate certain regulations as much as anybody, but I never minded when they said porn mags had to stay behind the counter with the clerk so young kids couldn’t get ’em. I don’t get porn in my snail-mail box without asking for it. It’s illegal. I sure wouldn’t mind tighter restrictions on no requested porn in my children’s email boxes (and subsequently mine).
The only way to get make that happen is to save the proof, find the end of the money trail and start suing the crap out of people. Make sure your local paper knows about it. Get a law passed.
And what the F@&k is up with Norton Antivirus? Are they hurting so bad that they need to resort to spam as bad as the worst? They pi$$ed me off so bad with all the spam that I removed all Norton products from my computer. I use InoculateIT (Computer Associates eTrust Antivirus) now. Screw you, Norton!
Thanks!