The Organ Grinder’s Monkey

Scary Monkey Says, “Granny Pr0n Is Not A Marketing Stragegy!”

The battle for the Great Internet Eyeball has reached a fever pitch. Everywhere you look, advertisers are running more and more outlandish ads in a desperate attempt to attract attention, and audiences are getting more savvy, becoming more ad-blind and arming themselves with better tools whose sole purpose is keeping those selfsame ads out of their face while they go about their daily Internet rituals.

If you run a business, then our very own bad biz cymbal-banger, Scary Monkey, has a message that you need to hear loud and clear: This is a battle you can not win.

You cannot force someone to want your product or buy your product or even momentarily consider your product by shoving more and more annoying, frequent, hyped, insulting, degrading, disgusting or just plain stupid ads in their face.

What you can do, however, is pretty much guarantee that they will loathe you, that they will go out of their way to avoid any further contact with you and that next time you get ready to launch an advertising campaign it will be even that much harder to get their attention.

Case in point - the disgusting and much loathed “granny boobs” ad campaign put out by coupon and deals service, Dealnews.

Grandma! NOOOOO!!!

Check out this ad:

This is (or at least was) an ad run by DealNews in the sidebar rotation at the popular news site Reddit, along with another ad featuring the same copy superimposed over a picture of a toddler digging for nose gold. Yum.

The ads sparked several blog posts and discussion threads, “Dear Reddit: Thank you! The grandma boobs finally drove me to install AdBlock Plus, and it is great!” and “Dear Reddit, we ALL HATE these “dealnews” ads! All of us. PLEASE get rid of them.”

Here’s a clue - If your ads are so annoying that they inflame an entire community into shouting loudly and publicly for your removal, if they’re so disturbing they provoke knee-jerk reactions of disgust, loathing and cries for “eye bleach,” if they’re so gobsmackingly awful that they inspire people to go out and immediately install ad blocking software - YOU’RE NOT DOING IT RIGHT!!!

Folks, this is no way to run a successful marketing campaign.

Remember what I said in my article, Do Me A Favor. Every interaction with you and your company should result in the client thanking you, not scrambling to figure out more efficient ways to avoid you.

Welcome To the Economic Era of, “Don’t Call Us, We’ll Call You.”

Before the Internet was born, the adage that there’s no such thing as bad publicity was actually reasonable - in those times, it was a real struggle to get the name of any product, service or celebrity out to the masses, and the fact that nothing sells like bad news meant that even bad publicity could result in lots of people hearing about, and becoming interested in, something they hadn’t known existed.

But no more. Via the Internet, there’s too much access to anything and everything anyone could ever hope to want, need or have interest in for the human mind to cope. As a result, the the priority these days is on filtering, rather than finding, information.

Yes, of course there are things out there that I’ve never heard of, and maybe your product or service might just be the thing I’ve always been looking for. The problem is, I just don’t care. I’m too busy juggling all the stuff I know about now to even consider adding more to that load.

If I suddenly decide I want what you’re offering, I’ll go looking for it myself. But in the meantime, if you have been pelting me with advertising, sales pitches disguised as newsletters, spam and so on, you can bet that when I’m ready for whatever type of product or service your business offers, your name won’t be at the top of my list.

Win the War By Refusing To Fight the Battle

Ads that attempt to attract attention and make sales by startling, shocking, talking, dancing, annoying, popping up, popping under, hovering, playing “catch me if you can” and so on are not doing you any favors. They are only costing you money, customers and audience share.

Any time you try to shove your product or service in someone’s face, hoping that maybe if they get some on their nose and lick it off, they’ll like it and want some more (as if your clients were recalcitrant cats who won’t eat their din-dins), you’re losing the battle.

The better bet? Quit fighting. Quit trying to wrestle your audience to the advertising mat and get them in an attention stranglehold, and start making friends with them. Do that, and you just might find out how cool and supportive your audience really is.

advertising, annoying ads, banner ads, dealnews, grandma boobs, granny pr0n, marketing, popup, reddit, shock advertising

Tags: Bad Monkey! Business and Marketing Craptacularity //