Category Archives: Huh?

January 16, 2019 · 2:40 pm

When Free Is $99

If you’ve not moved or bought a house recently, you are probably unfamiliar with the deluge of mail you receive for everything from supplemental mortgage insurance to yard services to security systems. The last time I bought a new place was in 1985 when it must have been a lot more difficult to pull together all the names and addresses of those people filing deeds or getting new mortgages. Apparently, it isn’t today.

One of the offers that showed up in the mailbox on Monday came from…well…I actually am not really sure from whom it came since there wasn’t a return address. It says it wants to welcome me to the neighborhood with a FREE OFFER! Of course, nothing in this world is free and this offer isn’t any different. The “free” security system will be installed with a $99 customer installation charge and the payment of $28 a month for monitoring. The free offer will only cost $435 the first year, and you have to sign a three-year agreement. Nice, right?  The fine print, which takes up a third of the second page, also mentions that labor charges might apply and that there are additional fees for various monitoring services beyond the basic. There are also limits on how many sensors you can get if your home isn’t prewired. Of course, it also comes with a $100 Visa gift card, so I got that working for me, which is nice.

This is yet another example of shady marketing. Sure, it’s a free offer in that the offer is free. The alarm and monitoring will run you thousands of dollars. The company behind it is called Protect Your Home and out of the 63 reviews for one location on Yelp, 59 are one-star reviews. There are complaints about being lied to by technicians, missed appointments, non-existent customer service, and even forged signatures. The BBB shows 1,630 complaints in the last three years. One can’t help but wonder why ADT, for whom they are an authorized reseller, doesn’t monitor how their brand is being marketed and serviced.

Trust is everything in marketing these days. A lot of fine print, unless it’s the sort of regulatory stuff the government makes you write as in a drug ad, is generally not a good indicator of trustworthiness. “Free” should really be free or the word should not be used. It sets an expectation which this company clearly doesn’t come close to meeting when the offer is broken down in detail. Honest marketing is one of the first steps to happy, satisfied, long-term customers. Beginning any relationship with a lie or half-truth really isn’t, is it?

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January 7, 2019 · 12:50 pm

When You Don’t Know What Business You’re In

I started 2019 by buying a new home. When I say new, I mean brand spanking new as in “just built.” As I’m preparing to move in, I did what most folks would do first these days and called my local Cable TV/ISP to come set up the house. The builder did a good job of preparing the house for both cable TV and for wired internet and phone. There is a large junction box in a closet with both coax and Cat 6 wire running to most rooms. The living room and master bedroom both have conduit running into the crawl space for wires to be run easily. Frankly, I thought the hardest part of getting everything set up would be joining the coax and network wires that were hanging out of the side of the house to the main feeder lines. I was so wrong, and the reason why I was is quite instructional for any of us in business.

Hooking the house to the main lines was easy. Then, the tech set up the cable modem and router for my high speed (400MB+) wifi network. So far, so good, The problem came when I asked about connecting the wires that were in the closet to a switch or the router. None of them have caps – the little plugs – on them. “I don’t do that,” he said. But how can I connect the rooms to the network? What about putting the coax wires into a splitter for cable in the various rooms? At least that would help me identify which wires ran to which rooms. No help there either, even though he is the cable installer.

The final bit of laziness came when he informed me that he couldn’t run any cable through the conduits. He said he couldn’t find the conduit opening in the crawl space even though he pushed a long rod down the conduit and then went to look for it in the crawl space. I went down the next morning and found the openings in about 2 minutes. Yes, it was late (4p) on a Friday afternoon and I’m sure he wanted to get out of there, but still.

So here are some things we can all take away. First, the fact that the tech had no idea how to run wired internet tells me that the cable TV companies still think they’re in the cable TV business. Any look at the numbers will show you that people care far more about broadband and their ability to stream than they do traditional cable TV. If you are an Internet Service Provider, that you need to provide the damn service, and that includes wiring houses. I want my smart TV’s wired in, along with my game console. It’s a much better experience than via wifi, even high-speed wifi.

Second, the techs are customer service people along with being technicians. This guy was very nice but did nothing to solve my problem. To make matters worse he never left any paperwork so I have no way to know what exactly he did do. I can’t even tell you what my VOIP phone number is. Any company representative that deals with customers in any way should be trained to do so properly. They must have a focus on solving problems, not on creating them. And they certainly should never lie.

My ISP doesn’t know what business it’s in. They still think they are proving cable TV. They also still don’t understand how the power in all businesses has shifted to the customer. Let’s all agree to start 2019 by rethinking what businesses we’re really in and how we provide it to our customers, shall we?

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December 19, 2018 · 12:23 pm

How Did We Get So Far Off Track?

I started working in the digital world in the mid-’90s. While I wasn’t exactly there for the dawn of the digital age, I was a relatively early member of the group of executives that began building businesses on the internet and on walled gardens like AOL used to be. A couple of things that have happened recently have me shaking my head, wondering how it’s all gone sideways.

First, I asked Twitter to send me something:

Keith Ritter, your advertiser list is ready! The list attached includes the advertisers that have included you in a tailored audience. These advertisers have included you in one or more tailored audiences. Tailored audiences are often built from email lists or browsing behaviors. They help advertisers reach prospective customers or people who have already expressed interest in their business.

I figured since I do a fair amount of cookie-blocking and other means to prevent tracking that I’d turn up in a handful of audiences and I was right. I appear in exactly 9 audiences. However, the rest of the 57-page document (not a typo) listed the similar audiences Twitter has decided I fit. They market me as a part of these audiences and I have no control over it. I can opt out and it will change the ads I see on Twitter. It won’t however, remove me from these audiences. I am included in over 1,000 of them, my data used and sold quite unwillingly.

Then there are the constantly apologizing folks at Facebook. This article in the NY Times is both frightening and disappointing. It talks about how Facebook “gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.”  Their privacy track record is abominable and every week it seems there is another apology and a promise to do better. Fool me once…

It’s taken years for the marketers and publishers to push back on the rampant fraud and abuse of programmatic ads. Social media is rife with “influencers” who buy fake followers and regularly violate FTC regulations on advertising. It seems that everyone under 30 is either a ninja or a guru. Fake reviews for products that are complete rip-offs are everywhere (run a link to an Amazon review through Fakespot if you don’t believe me).

All of this leaves one question: what the hell happened? How did the digital business world get so screwed up? At some point, Facebook and many other digital businesses decided that making money is way more important than serving their users is, I think, the basic answer. I’m all for making money, as my business track record shows. There are limits, however, and I have a fundamental belief that making money can only happen over the long term when you respect the customer. As the great David Ogilvy once said, “The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife.” Because most of the people who use digital have no concept about how they are tracked and marketed, most businesses treat them as morons and therein lies the problem.

I could rant on but I’ll end it here with a plea. To any of you who are in the digital world, please resolve to get back on track. Way back when in 1995, all we wanted to do was to amuse a few people and keep them engaged. Yes, we sold ads but we also didn’t track people once they left our domain. We didn’t treat them as numbers or rubes. You shouldn’t either. I get that the tools are more sophisticated and more powerful and that the world has changed. Basic business principles and human decency haven’t, have they?

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