Some of Alan's views on this digital marketing malarkey ... there's more on: AlanCharlesworth.com

Monday, December 10, 2007

a bit too clever ?

My local radio featured an ad for the city of Newcastle - specifically, Christmas shopping. The ad ended with reference to a web site. Nothing wrong so far. The domain name they gave out was [I thought] "any one for newcastle dot co dot uk".

So I typed in 'www.anyonefornewcastle.co.uk' - which delivered a re-directed site on the domain 'ne1fornewcastle.co.uk' - which as it is the used URL seems to be the tag line for the promotion. For those who don't know [and I assume there will be many], NE1 is the post code for Newcastle city centre.

But here's the thing, I can think of two scenarios for this

1 'any one for newcastle' makes sense as a tag line - so why complicate the issue with this NE1 business? If that is the case, put this one down as 'ooow, double meaning, what clever marketers we are'. Sorry, but too much of an 'in-joke' to work.

2 They developed the NE1 campaign without realising that when spoken it sounds like 'any one' - but surely not? On the plus side, at least they had registered the relevant domain names if this is the case.

Either way, it all seems a bit complex to me.

Tuesday, December 4, 2007

excellent email marketing

I use CuteFTP to maintain my web site - and last week I had trouble oploading things. As it turned out the error was [probably] with my hosting company, but by then I had emailed GlobalSCAPE [who provide the cuteFTP service] asking them to take a look for any problems.

When the thing started working again I sent an email to say thanks ... but everything was OK. They replied, and a couple of minutes another email arrived - with the following adNow that is targeted direct marketing ... even if I'm not interested in my own FTP server.

Monday, December 3, 2007

poor identity-protection practice

I have signed up to Google Alerts [if someone searches on my name in Google, they tell me] and got this one.

So I clicked on the link - and got this on zoominfo.
comThe thing is, that's not me - but look what I got when I clicked on the 'this is me' link.
As I have the same name as this 'Alan', I could easily have filled in the form - my email address even has the right name on it, so zoominfo would think I'm genuine [or someone else could open up a hotmail - or similar - account in that name]. I could then go on to submit any details [lies] about this person. Hmmm - might be worth checking this site to make sure you haven't been listed, and if so, YOU fill in the details.