Hidden Messages

by Alan Belniak on September 11, 2009 · 7 comments

in Marketing

I got a medium-sized envelope in the mail yesterday.  It was addressed to me, at my work address.  I noted that the return address  was in Texas, but didn’t immediately notice the three letters above the address (come to find out it was a company name).  I have to admit that I was curious.  Really curious.  I Googled the name before I opened it and didn’t get much info from the top few results.

So, I opened it.  It was a one page letter, very short (see the picture), complete with a custom URL to a microsite and some convoluted/obscured text at the bottom.  Out of the envelope also fell some 3D-like glasses (except for red and blue lenses, both lenses are red).  I put these on and read the now-clear text.

VLG glasses and letter

The look on co-workers faces as they walked by my office was priceless.

Hmm, I thought.  This is pretty interesting.

So, I went to the site and read the first page of contents.  What was great was that the site loaded fast, has some good graphics and images, not many words, and was easy to follow.  Again, there was some convoluted/obscured text, so I donned my reader glasses once more and read the message.  I clicked through (it asked me to, so I obliged), and it brought me to a value proposition page.

I’ll have to say I found this page a bit harder to follow.  I wasn’t entirely sure what this company did.  But I liked that it, too, was clean and simple.
Here’s the kicker: about three minutes later, my phone rang. I looked on the caller ID display, and it wasn’t a number I recognized.  I Googled “area code 214” and sure enough – it was Texas.  What’s great about this exchange is that this company knew I was reading their site because I just clicked through.  They were making a bet I was in the office (versus on the road or somewhere else, maybe mobile) and that they’d reach me.  I was torn away from the desk momentarily, so I couldn’t take the call.  But they left a message, and I called back, because I thought it was so clever.  They engaged me in a way that wasn’t obtrusive and actually intrigued me.

This is an interesting way to reach out to people (interesting to me, since I’ve never seen it before).  It reminded me of the way that the Discovery Channel reached out to certain people (like Chris Brogan) with its ‘Frenzied Waters’ campaign earlier this year (July 2009) for Shark week.

What do you think?  Is this clever?  Invasive?  Creepy? Novel?  Something else?

(The company is VLG Marketing and Advertising, and the URL is www.wefightboredom.com.  Full disclosure – I am not a client, I have not engaged with them for any of their services.  But you know what?  When I had the conversation with them, it was pleasant.  I commended them on how clever it was.  They got my attention.)

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  • mkeals

    Very clever, yes. But I think it could be difficult to toe the line between intriguing and creepy. Plus, you would have to acknowledge that some people you are trying to reach would be too busy to play along. Given the right hook, I would probably bite.

  • Alan Belniak

    Thanks for the comment, mkeals. I agree that it is borderline creepy. What was good, though, was that the phone call was warm and friendly, and not at all aggressive or ‘markety’. So that helped subdue the exchange. For a real creep factor (but fun), check out the ‘Frenzied Waters’ campaign that Discovery Channel did. Chris Brogan (link above) posted a really good video review about that.

  • http://www.nhplace.com/kent/ Kent Pitman

    Things like this are only clever when one person does it as a novelty, which is why they’re so seductive, because at that point in time, and only at that time, it is the result of cleverness. Thereafter, it’s the result of pedestrian copying of technique and no longer represents cleverness. Once institutionalized and routine, they’re increasingly creepy and confining AND impossible to back out of because soon it’s something that no one can afford NOT to do. The future is one of no privacy whatsoever unless people actively draw a line and call this kind of behavior out as undesirable.

    In the meta, there’s an intellectual intrigue in being excited by ever-more-clever exploitation of information, but it’s better to learn that information is simply private and not to be exploited for second-hand or non-obvious uses. Otherwise, the information warfare game becomes like the arms race–spiraling ever higher in terms of where it goes and what measures must be done by the opposition (in this case, the individual) to retain parity.

    I recommend a healthy dose of remedial reading at http://www.epic.org/

  • Alan Belniak

    Kent,
    Thanks for the reply. I agree with your “clever-to-ubiquity” assertion on this path. However, I’m not sure I wholly agree (or follow) your comments on privacy. I should point out that this was entirely “opt-in”. I didn’t have to click on the site – heck, I didn’t even have to open the envelope! So, I personally OK with the outcome, because I had a hand in the fate. If I start getting random phone calls because of other sites I visit or messages I send, that’s a different story all together!

  • http://www.nhplace.com/kent/ Kent Pitman

    But the point is that you opted into going to the site, you didn’t opt into having them track you. The problem is that bad things become incremental compositions of good things, and that at no point is there a time where you have opted into the total effect. By the time the more expanded problems happen, it’s too late.

    This has been a problem for decades now, and the buzzword has been “more personalized service” but my response has consistently been this: More personalized doesn’t mean inferring things about me, it means TALKING to me. For example, at some point in the mid 90′s I started to get lots of mail about object-oriented programming. Cool, I thought, the world is switching over to that because proportionally that’s most of what I see. But, in fact, it wasn’t that. Certainly not in proportion to what I got. What was really happening was that someone had tagged me as once having bought something about object-oriented something, and forever after I was pigeon-holed as preferring that. That meant I would not see alternatives any more, and condemned me to a special hell almost like at least one Twilight Zone episode I can think of where I only got what I wanted, but it didn’t end up being Heaven.

    Amazon does the same thing–seeing me buy gifts for others and inferring that, for example, I like music. (Mostly I am not a music listener.) At least in its case, it makes this irritating inference transparent and lets me ask “Why” so that I can edit and fix my preference. But I would STILL prefer that if they want to be personal they ask me and if I don’t want to tell them, I have the option. I’ve heard indirectly that Amazon actually believes that people are not experts in what they want and that they have the attitude that they know better than the individuals themselves what they want (in the sense of what they will buy). And that might even be true. But my point isn’t that it is either a successful business strategy or not, but rather that it’s not a “personalized” strategy. Perhaps “targeted” is a better word since it has a unilateral feel.

  • http://www.wefightboredom.com Michael

    Kent makes a good point, but it’s a bit naive. Personalized marketing has become an arms race, because it’s more than addressing a person by name. Relevant messaging, relevant content, and relevance in general gets and keeps people engaged. Business-to-business marketing rarely delivers personalized solutions. All we’re trying to dois get you to the web, deliver relevant content, and then pick up the phone and ask you what you REALLY want or need. You (your company) may not want or need our solution. That’s okay. If I can’t get you on the phone, I’ll never know. Clearly, our specialty is the B2B space, because it can skirt the more personal interaction between consumer and retailer. We’re selling to a person that spends the company’s money. So, the marketing program Alan referenced was meant to engage Alan the director of social media marketing at PTC not Alan the guy that shops at Target (a guess). Here’s my bias. My company, VLG, crafted and launched this decoder glasses campaign to sell our marketing services to companies like PTC. The back-and-forth provides some great feedback for our team. Many thanks.

  • http://www.nhplace.com/kent/ Kent Pitman

    A company has as much interest in havnig its individual interests be private as any person–perhaps moreso. The last thing you want to do in a company is trip off your competition that you’re investigating a new area by your visible pattern of web actions outside the company being collected, aggregated, and analyzied. I forget the circumstance but there was some past government action (Desert Storm?) where people following the sudden spike in the number of late-night pizza orders to the Pentagon were able to predict that something big was about to happen.

    Personal, to a company, still means “intentional”. That is, consistent either with intentional public statements, patterns of public marketing, or whatever. But private watchings of clicks around the net–clicks that are individually necessary to the doing of business but that are not themselves decisions to release public information, are likely to do little other than to make companies nervous about allowing their employees to browse freely.

    Or so it seems to me.

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