Archive for November, 2006

Mortgage and Ringtone Ads Prowl for Cheaper Keywords

Monday, November 27th, 2006

 

The cost of competitive pay-per-click keywords (PPC) has risen through the roof. New online advertisers with no clue about prudent pay-per-click bidding strategies are entering the marketplace every hour, and Google is banking more bucks than the Sultan of Burunei off it. In response, seasoned advertisers are trying all kinds of desperate measures to find cheap clicks.

Mortgage leads is one of the spammiest sectors in the online jungle. If you enter your personal info into this landing page , within the hour your phone will start to ring off the hook with high-pressure sales calls. Because one loan can make hundreds of thousands in interest for a lender, the leads sell for a nice price. So do the ads that generate them. “Mortgage loan” goes for around $10.97 – $15.93 per click, according to Google’s Traffic Estimator tool. Mere mortal mortgage marketers must look to cheaper pastures, so they now target irrelevant keywords like “Native American tribes” :

 

(Do they do wigwam, igloo, and tee pee refinancing?)

Another hot sector is ringtones – the beloved technology that spontaneously injects the chords to “We Will Rock You” into classrooms, offices, and worship services across the nation. This smooth landing page signs you up for them fast. But to see the fine print detailing the monthly fees, you’ll have to scroll way down.

Smart marketers like Shoemoney have made BIG money swinging ringtones via pay-per-click campagins involving millions of keywords. It’s gotten so competitive now, that they’re having to look past the cheaper pastures and right into the barn – by serving ads on “equestrian” related searches:

 

 

…just in case your thoroughbred needs a “Camptown Races” ringtone on his new iPhone .

 

Posted in Affiliate Marketing, PPC, Spam | Comments

True.com Ads Snare 1,000 Victims Per Hour

Monday, November 20th, 2006

 

True.com ad scam parody sleazy

True.com’s ads have become a pop-cultural online icon – a symbol of deceptive online advertising.

The mega-budget interactive campaign is heavily plastered across social media networks like Tribe and MySpace and it works quite well: the ads lure in almost 1,000 new member sign ups per hour.

True.com wasn’t always an extortionate scam site.

The company first started off as “True Beginnings,” and was positioned as wholesome, marriage-minded dating service!

That was was slow-going, so they tried the “No Marrieds. No Felons.” safer-dating angle with rigorous background checks. Unfortunately that didn’t sell so well, either.

Now True.com’s founder Herb Vest has hit the jackpot by positioning True.com as a sleazy hook-up site. His patented advertising method consists of scantly clad models and licentious headlines beckoning you to sign up for a “free” trial.

If you fall for the “free” trial offer you have to give over your credit card information. Then they’ve really got you.

Many users report deceptive practices getting fake winks from bogus “date bait” profiles (pictures of models), or messages far away “members” like hot blondes located in Columbia. Some even get hit on by Nigerian scammers posing as hotties!

Folks who try to cancel the service before the “free” trial expires find that it is impossible to do so online: a cancellation feature has deliberately been omitted from the online interface.

Victims report:

It’s time the True® truth be told. The best way to illustrate it is with this actual, unaltered affiliate program ad from the company:

Posted in Ad Parody, Dating Sites, True.com | Comments

Quixtar MLM Video Parody

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

Kudos to the creative folks over at Where’s My Jet Pack? for this spoof of the MLM “business.”

This video ad brilliantly exposes the cold truth about Quixtar, an offshoot of Amway, that is the highest earning MLM scam of all time. It seems to be the only one that has lasted more than a decade.

If you have ever been approached by an acquaintence about a “exciting business opportunity” turned out to be hustling overpriced vitamin pills or weight-loss patches for them as your ticket to “financial freedom,” this video is for you.

It explains it all in less than a minute.

Posted in Ad Parody, MLM | Comments

Wal-Mart’s Paid Critics Flog Real Critics

Saturday, November 11th, 2006

Better watch what you say.

Edelman’s newest flog, or fake blog, is a brilliant little hit campaign designed to intimidate us into showing reverence for Wal-Mart.

They want you to believe that commies like me, who think of Wal-Mart as a cultural and economical contagion, have financial incentive to do so.

(It’s not because being in the place for more than five minutes makes our skin crawl.)

Folks who just recently picked up a 9000 FREE Hours of AOL CD with their beloved 72-pack of Sam’s Choice Cola will probably read the flog and believe it.

Wal-Mart’s mercenary hit squad did some very convincing pseudomarketing. The writing is clever, the criticism and doubt-casting is masterful (as one would expect from top PR professionals), and the graphic design is brilliant. The spin doctors’ prescription suggests that Wal-Mart is a benevolent corporate “Robin Hood” that provides jobs, charity, and generous discounts to the working classes. The only problem is that is getting bullied by an malevolent conspiracy of paid critics.

Who exactly are these “paid critics?”

Apparently any politicians who receive donations from local businesses (on the brink of getting shut down by Wal-Mart) are the evil kingpins. They are the top of the massive payola conspiracy of Professional Wal-Mart Critics®.

If criticizing Wal-Mart paid anything close to what a high-end journalist writing a flog on the Wal-Mart corporate PR account must earn – I would love to be a salaried, Professional Wal-Mart Critic®!

It would be the easiest job in the world! you would never run out of material for inspiration. You could make it a comedy or a tragedy. You could make it like “Hee Haw,” “Clerks,” or a Michael Moore anti-corporate documentary. The wealth of possibilities for critical satire is even richer than Sam Walton.

Sign me up!

And send me my first check for this piece.

Posted in Astroturfing, Fake Blogs | Comments

“Oh Lynda, You’re So Fine!” – Classmates.com

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

 

Yep, she sure is!

Lynda, the nerdiest girl in your class who you never talked to, is now a online banner ad cover girl.

Who would have known?

Lynda tempts our voyeuristic curiosity to see what became of our former classmates. Especially those lurid nerd-to-glamour girl or valedictorian-to-serial killer sort of 180-degree ironies – stuff that could bring us a quick rush of emotional gratification.

Classmates.com was a really good idea when it started back in 1995. The internet was just taking off among the upper-class early adopter segment. The pay-for-access e-mail database model was fairly viable.

But now, with all the competition from free social networking sites, I suspect it’s a million times harder for Classmates to get people to pay for membership. Their business model got eclipsed by new technology. And so did a lot of the old information in their database – like expired Hotmail addresses, or Geocities and Tripod pages from your classmates who logged into once back in ‘98.

I have contacted several of my former classmates, for free, thanks to MySpace. It’s been a brief hoot to connect, compare and see what they’re up to. (Some are in Hollywood, some are on Madison Avenue, and some are in rehab.)

But in many cases, the things we had common over a decade ago have drifted apart. I’m sure if we met in-person it would be a blast, but the online conversations feel a bit distant and forced.

My best memories of the good ol’ days are the analog ones. Like calling up old friends. Or going through the old seventies editions of my high school yearbooks they kept in our school library and looking at the giant afros.

What if I signed up at Classmates.com in order to digitally reconnect with Lynda, the shy nerd girl I never talked to who is now a banner ad model? We’d have so little to talk about, it would hurt to even try.

I think I’ll pass.

Posted in Ad Parody, Banner Ad Commentary | Comments

Flogging Wal-Mart

Thursday, November 9th, 2006

Top-tier public relations firm Edelman is taking some heavy-duty flack from the media and PR community for cooking up a bogus site called Wal-Marting Across America.

Edelman’s Wal-Mart team recently admitted to publishing the flog, or fake blog, about a couple who loved Wal-Mart so much that they went on an RV adventure across America, staying in Wal-Mart parking lots. What better way to put their finger on the pulse of Real™, Working-Class America®?

The fact that it was a paid PR stunt with professional journalists and photographers was not disclosed.

The blog attracted a ton of scrutiny from the media and from people who hate Wal-Mart .

Before Edelman knew it the fiasco was cracked. The flog was outted, and their eye was blacked.

The sister astroturf organization, Working Families for Wal-Mart, also got exposed by all the backlash.

Lesson: Do something deceptive to get publicity, you might well get your wish.

But it might not be the kind of publicity you want.

Just ask the one surviving member of the superstar pseudomarketing group Milli Vanilli.

Posted in Fake Blogs | Comments

The Death of the Sales Letter?

Monday, November 6th, 2006

You know the ad.

The one with the powerful red headline.

The “pile of money” wealth shot. The “From the Desk Of:” header. The red, white and blue formatting with exclamation points and yellow highlighting. The bold promises of riches and amazing benefits. The cheapo graphic design and typography.

Whenever I see this kind of message, a huge red flag goes off. I automatically disregard the integrity of the message and cast a very skeptical eye on it. Pretty much the only way I’ll keep reading – if at all – is for entertainment value.

Back when I was a kid, catalog marketers and direct mail professionals did the writing. The quality control was better and the products were actual, tangible goods. But since the advent of online advertising, the sheer number of sketchy e-book hustlers and squeeze page pimps – ALL USING THE SAME FORMAT – has exploded. It’s out of control.

I am aware the sales letter is a classic, time-tested marketing format. A product of scientific split-tests and billions of dollars swindled made and lost. And I know that a small but statistically-significant percentage of people DO fall for it.

But how much longer can this approach keep working? How long will it take before average Joe surfer becomes jaded? Look at the Nigerian 419 letter , or Viagra Spam du jour… they don’t have much fizzle anymore.

But maybe it doesn’t matter how many people get a clue, because “a sucker is born every minute.”

The copywriters who crank this stuff out defend it by saying “All the scams might have long copy sales letters, but not all long copy sales letters are scams.”

Either way, the whole style seems about as modern as a 1968 comic book ad. It’s the uncensored, low-budget, late night infomercial of the web.

Can we not move on to a sophisticated method of direct-response copywriting? A more modern, Web 2.0 paradigm of written persuasion?

Posted in Get Rich Quick, Sales Letters | Comments