Calling Out the Trash
Posted by Robert Celaschi on Mon, Oct 04, 2010
Why let companies get away with lazy B2B marketing?
British “geek comedian” Tom Scott has come up with a set of journalism warning labels. He actually prints these out on stickers so he can paste them on the free newspapers he finds while riding the London Underground. While they are meant as a joke, they have a sting of truth to them:
- Warning: This article contains unsourced, unverified information from Wikipedia.
- Warning: Journalist does not understand subject they are writing about.
- Warning: To ensure future interviews with subject, important questions were not asked.
Don’t you wish you could stick some similar labels on corporate marketing? I’m not talking about those instances when you know someone simply didn’t have the time and resources to do the job they might have liked. I mean when you know someone has gotten lazy, or thinks the audience is stupid, or has fallen in love with some technology that gets in the way of the message. I’d love to have a set of labels like these:
- Warning: This website forces you to endure a long Flash intro before you can see the information you came for.
- Warning: The client never actually said any of the quotes in this press release. We’re not even sure he read them before giving his approval.
- Warning: The sample size in our survey is so small that the results are meaningless.
- Warning: We don’t know where these numbers came from, but numbers are impressive so we used them anyhow.
Want to play along? It’s fun and depressingly easy. Share some of the warning labels you’d love to attach to B2B marketing materials.