Another pitch that goes wrong

  

This pitch arrived in my LinkedIn messages today: 

• Hello Mam, I want to collaborate with you regarding articles publications on techopedia.com plz respond so we could discuss further.

It's amazing how many wrong notes a person can pack into such a short message.

1. What is this "Mam" doing here? I'm not clear on whether he was going a casual "Hey, man," vibe and mistyped the last letter or if he is misspelling Ma'am as in Madame. But why would he do that when he can address me properly by name?

2. Jumping right into what you want without establishing some basis to interest me in the endeavor. What value is supposed to be in this for me? Do you have industry insight to share? More likely, he's just hoping to get his company offerings described in a publication without paying for it.

3. While he may have found me from Techopedia, he did not bother to check that on profile I show it as ending a couple of months back when the publication was sold to a new owner. It's being taken in quite a different direction by a company that heavily pushes gaming and crypto and so is no longer the same type of publication that I contributed to.

4. What's up with this nonstandard "plz" in this context? You're not texting a buddy but trying to set up some kind of working relationship with someone new, so this is hardly the way to express yourself.

In a certain mood, I may have responded, but I decided to write about this instead. Any other writers get similar messages with the same pattern?

One bad turn deserves another

Later, the same day, I got this message (all misspelled words retained from the original):

• Guest posting equries

  Hi! I saw the page of your blog techopedia.com and I saw that the page the page of your blog is beautiful and well decorated. I really enjoy your recent blog post. It is very effective and interesting. I want to share my thoughts on your blog. I totally understand that there would be some editorial fee involved and I'm ready to pay. I hope so you will like my suggestion and we will get benefited mutually side by side and this will help us both to rank our business. It's my pleasure that we work together I have bulk orders on your sites. Kinldy share your sites lists. Then we work mutually together. I hope u understand well. I'm waitning for your positive response Kind regards

A few weeks later, I got this doozy

I visited your YouTube channel and found that your channel videos are not SEO optimized and your videos have very low SEO scores. If you want me to grow your channel more and grow your business and your videos go viral, I will do on-page and off-page SEO optimization with your channel videos and work with actionable and performance tags of your videos and improve the SEO score of each of your videos to 95 plus score out of 100. As a result, your videos will go viral, every video will rank on YouTube, YouTube will get your videos first in search engines and people will find your videos very easily and your videos will come up in google-search. And I will promote your YouTube channel organically and manually. As a result, your channel will get more subscribers, likes, views and watch time day by day. As a proof I am giving you a sheet with before and after SEO results with links to some of my client's channel videos that are live on YouTube where you can see all the details. Please check this:[redacted] Please feel free to inbox me if you have any questions!

The reason it's such a doozy is that I don't have a YouTube channel, so the claim that he checked it automatically mark him an incompetent liar -- not someone I'd ever consider giving my business.

Related:

How to get everything wrong in a pitch

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Major Marketing Missteps from Adidas, M&M's and Coke

No more boots for Ms. Green and other changes for M&M's candies

A major component of marketing is tapping into trends and  making an impression. When it works, these brand messages captures attention and show their relevance to customer concerns to increase feelings of loyalty. 

 But when the brand missteps, it embarrasses itself and risk alienating the very people it intended to court. Here are three recent examples from major brands that certainly had the budge to do adequate research before launching such campaigns.

Adidas' topless pics: branding boon or bust? 

On February 9, 2022, Adidas pinned a tweet with the hashtag #SupportEverything that included 25 pictures of women's breasts to demonstrates the range of sizes, shapes, and colors (though skin tones have no bearing whatsoever on the fit and support of a bra). Here's the tweet without the photos:

The brand posted the same photo to its Instagram, though there the breasts have a bit of airbrushing to achieve the digital equivalent of pasties. The overall reaction  on the Meta-owned platform was more positive than it was on Twitter, judging from the sentiments expressed in the nearly 3k quote tweets.

It's true that some considered the move liberating. For example, Jezebel applauded the tweet in Adidas Frees the Nipple. 

The Barstoolsports blog response corroborates what I thought was the real game here: baring what is usually covered still gets a certain amount of shock value, and that is what the brand is exploiting in presenting the 25 pictures.  While the post celebrated achieving marketing goals, the comments in response were not at all the positive if you're after celebrating diversity in women's bodies. It is the inevitability of such reactions that makes some people feel this is not a positive step for women

On its own site, Adidas doesn't show any topless women. In fact, the embedded video (also on YouTube) that explains the problem women have in finding the right fit only shows braless women from the back, where the marks left from bras attest to poor fit.  

The braless pictures, on the other hand, are meant to make the very reasonable notion of making sports bras do more than serve as short tank tops into something almost transgressive. It's really not, and Adidas is certainly not the first brand to offer more bra fit choices than the standard 32A to 40D range of sizes.

My guess is the social media manager was told, "Do something to get people's attention," and the person decided this was pushing the envelope. For the "no such thing as bad publicity" school of thought, it's a success. But I believe that the brand did alienate some potential customers here, making it into a branding bust (pun intended) for a consumer brand with a very wide market base.

M&M's misses the mark when aiming for inclusivity

M&M's candies got a makeover in the name of inclusivity. But the public is not impressed. M&M’s announcement about the changes included this video:

The comments are probably not quite what they were expecting, or they would have disabled them to begin with, as I wrote here. 

 

Mars says it’s not just about candy but a larger commitment “to create a world where society is inclusive.”  The emphasis on women’s representation is what trickles down to showing the candies that have female identities wearing more sensible shows now than they have in the past.  

For example, Ms. Brown’s high heels have been replaced by sensible pumps. Ms. Green’s heeled boots are replaced by comfortable sneakers.

I’m all for comfortable footwear myself and gave up on high heels long ago, though I have to say, I don’t really believe that cartoon renderings designed to sell candies will have a direct impact on female choices. The representations of different types of people could add to the fun consuming candies but they really don’t direct people’s life decisions. 

Indeed, that kind of critique was raised even by those who are very much in favor of changing thing. The fact remains that fictionalized progress is no substitute for real progress. Then there's the other camp that is tired of brands' claims they’re saving the world through their products and marketing. 

Despite marketers insisting that people want to see their values reflected in brand messaging, claiming too much for a brand makeover can backfire. It’s clear that audiences are not nearly as impressed with the brand message as the brand is with itself, and that’s now a win.  

Coke missteps when hopping on the gaming bandwagon

Massively multiplayer online (MMO) are designed to be extremely engaging with life-like characters and details to make up an immersive environment. As I wrote here, they often center around epic battles between species that may be using highly advanced or medieval style weapons.

Coca-Cola brand decided to hope on this hot trend, using an MMO as the backdrop for the commercial it released on September 30, 2021:

Spoiler alert: drinking Coke doesn’t just revive the player; it gives the ross between an Orc and the Hulk character in the game enlightenment. He literally throws down his weapon and grasps the hand of his enemy is a show of solidarity that brings the whole world to the verge of shocked recognition. 

Everyone embraces peace and love to fit wit the tagline of “We are one Coke Away from each other.”

Coke

One of the comments on the video is from Kevin Sugrue who explains what the brand gets wrong::

“Lacks insight and understanding of esport gamers. This tries to approriate [sic!] the gaming trend in Coke's pursuit of regaining relevance among a younger audience. You compete in MMO games to help your team triumph over the competition; not to unite the entire world.”

Here Coke tried to plaster its “I’d like to buy the world a Coke and teach it harmony” jingle on a specific form of gamification culture that may just resent the intrusion. Those who are deeply involved in that culture consider it an epic fail for the brand.

On the flip side, we have examples of brands that seized opportunities to endear themselves to the public, as in the case of Audi's response to a loss on Wheel of Fortune.

Related: Mary Poppins' Guide to Gamified Marketing

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VR heats up at YouTube

n June 22, the New York Times reported that, with the exception of the gaming industry, VR has proven a disappointment. It cites weak sales for VR headsets and the fact that all the “dabbling” in VR ventures has not amounted to serious strides.

But that may change with a boost from YouTube. The Google-owned video site is promoting the development of VR videos with new resources and tools that help developers and may make VR videos more attractive for marketing.

Which VR elements in a video get the most attention? That's something that creators are able to track with Heatmaps, a feature that YouTube rolled “for 360-degree and VR videos with over 1,000 views” on June 16.

You can see an example of a heatmap applied to a music video here: 

Read more in YouTube Heats Up VR Market

Wait, what?

This is not a post on the popular book that bears that title. (I did write about that here:  uncommoncontent.blogspot.com.) This is my reaction to the number a billion that sounds impressive but is really completely meaningless without context.*

When I shared a link today on LI, it offered me three other links to read. Among them was a FastCompany article, "Six Ways YouTube Is Primed For The Future (And Four Areas That Need Work)" Now read what it says for the fifth and see if you have the same reaction I do:

5. YouTube’s rebuilt algorithms have led viewers to watch 1 billion hours of video a day. YouTube is optimized for what it calls “watch time,” which encompasses what users view, how long they tune in, the length of their overall YouTube session, and so forth. Together, these signals help YouTube algorithms decide which videos a user is most likely to watch shortly after they’re posted and which will lead to the longest overall viewing period.

Do you get what's missing here? How many viewers are there? How many hours did they watch before the algorithms were rebuilt?

Without those two pieces of information, we really have no way of knowing how much of an advance one billion hours of video a day represents. Sure, it sounds like a lot, but we don't know if it represents the two billion people watching an average of a half an hour a day or one billion watching an average of an hour, or half a million watching two hours.

 We also don't know if the actual goal was to bring in more viewers or to keep the ones already watching on the channel for longer. That's a pretty important piece of context, as well, if one is to judge if the algorithms are accomplishing what the company intended for them. The article does refer to 800 million YouTube consumers of music but doesn't clarify whether or not that represents the viewers in total and if that number represents an increase over the number before the adjustment to the algorithms.

The bottom line is this: Don't be dazzled by numbers, no matter how large, that are presented without the relevant context.


*Related post http://writewaypro.blogspot.com/2016/10/data-visualization-you-have-to-c-it-to.html
http://uncommoncontent.blogspot.com/2017/09/missingness-at-museum.html