Thursday, August 1, 2002
Send
Me Your Stories
By David L.
Smith
I’m
writing today about something that has been stuck in my craw for a
while. This weekend, talking to a pal in the business, the concept
solidified.
There is too much crap
going on in our business. The “Tin Men” still abound. Here we are,
trying to sell our industry to the Global 3,000. And we remain extremely
vulnerable. Our industry is ridden with porn, spyware, spam and many
other practices that foul the waters.
So here is what I propose.
Send me your ugly stories. I want to hear about the flim-flam. The bait
and switch. The double opt-in that wasn’t. The new technology that was
really a whole bunch of interns in the back room (ok, maybe that is not
as bad as the others, but you get the point).
If you feel like it, name
names. If you can't, that’s ok too. Give me the bad practices at the
10,000-foot level. I will know what to do with them.
I’m going to collect all
of this and publish a story, first in MediaPost and eventually to the
widest possible audience. It is time to expose all that is bad in our
industry to the outside world. Why? We are better off doing it before
others do. Our whole industry could go the way of Enron and Arthur
Anderson with a couple of accusatory stories in the Wall Street Journal
or Business Week where it looks like the industry as a whole endorses
these practices. If we reveal them first, we will be much better off.
We’ve been as much of a
victim as others. Mediasmith has actually bought “opt-in” e-mail lists
that resulted in so much pissed off e-mail to a client that they fired
us. Turned out the e-mail list sales people did not even know about the
shoddy practices of their management (or said they didn’t). This company
has since approached us three different times, each time with a
different name!
Since I haven’t gotten all
of the stories, I really don’t know if in my final write-up I will name
names (risking lawsuits) or only describe practices. But I am determined
to try to do something with this. It would be great to come up with a
top ten rogues’ gallery of bad practices and revisit this from time to
time.
Send the stories back to
me via Online Spin. Or, if you want, go around Spin and send it to me
directly at smith@mediasmithinc.com. That way, I can sanitize the story
prior to publication. If you want to provide me with examples “off the
record” I will honor that request. Just give me the dirt!
“Mad as hell and not going
to take it any more.”
