Marketing Roadmaps

Blogger relations

Cuddly as a cactus, charming as an eel

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santa-photos

This bad pitch gets the Grinch Award for crass commercialism and totally missing the point of Christmas.

More than 100 years ago, Francis Church reassured a young girl about Santa Claus with words that created a picture that still resonates today. This service, on the other hand, suggests lying to your kids with faked photographs. Bad enough, but that’s  not what they are pitching.

It’s really a thinly disguised affiliate marketing pitch.

However, the blogger to whom this was sent does not run advertising or review products. She’s also Jewish. If you are counting, that’s three strikes, and makes it crystal clear that the flack has never read the blog.

If you are going to pitch Christmas, at least get one thing right: Christmas is about GIVING, not about how much money we can make off our friends and readers. Donate to charity. Give toys for tots. Something to show that you are not the Burgermeister.

Not to mention, the product is just yucky. If you choose to share Santa with your children, there are so many ways to make him real that reinforce the spirit of the holiday and the imagination of the child. You don’t need some faked photo.

If you are going to call on Santa to help with your product or your pitch, make sure what you’re offering has the right holiday spirit. Lying to your kids does not qualify.

Today’s clip is, of course, You’re a Mean One Mr. Grinch:

Naughty or nice?

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Today, I have two pitches for you. One naughty, one nice.

I’ll start with the nice one. First, some facts. This is another pitch for a shapewear product, which is always a dicey proposition of the “does this dress make me look fat?” variety. In fact, I discussed this pitch with two mom bloggers via email, one who was initially offended and one who quite liked the pitch. Further proof, by the way, and pun intended, that one size does not fit all.

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While I find the product name unfortunate — Yummie Tummie just doesn’t have the allure that the name  Spanx has — I write about the pitch, not the product. And this is a decent one. While it includes  product information, it isn’t solely about the shapewear. The pitch adds value with the content at the EatDrinkandBeYummie microsite and offers product for both review and a giveaway on the blogger’s site, two tactics that are at the top of my list for a good pitch.  The intro flash is really quite cute, although don’t watch on a slow connection. Like all flash, it needs speed.

Marketers take note: a significant benefit of a dedicated microsite is that it is far easier to measure the results than a campaign that sends all web traffic to the home page.

Negatives. Not too many.  It seems like they used a broad mom blogger list for the outreach, and in the instance I mentioned above where the blogger was a bit offended, part of the problem was they pitched her for the wrong blog. She writes a number of different blogs, each with its own editorial purpose, and the juxtaposition of the pitch with a specific and not appropriate blog was jarring. The broad nature of the pitch could also have been a problem. I’d be interested in hearing from other women who received it what their reactions were.

It also seems like the offer of the review and giveaway product is contingent upon coverage, and if you’ve been reading me for any length of time, you know my mantra: if the pitch is good, you don’t need to ask them to write.

Nevertheless, it’s a nice pitch, especially in counterpoint to last week’s scummy pitch for arm girdles. For proving that it is possible to pitch shapewear to women without implying that we’re fat, the Festive Fruitcake Award goes to Yummie Tummie and its agency Rocket XL.  (By the way, Santa, if you are reading, I wouldn’t mind a Yummie Tummie in my Christmas stocking.)

The naughty pitch isn’t so much naughty as it is nasty, but nasty doesn’t work too well with today’s holiday song (below). As noted above, women and weight is a sensitive issue. Whether we have too much, too little or just think we have. Fat, thin, heavy, skinny, flabby. I don’t know many American women who don’t have some issue with weight, and quite frankly, our culture encourages women to have a negative body image. That’s not a battle I can fight with this blog.

Except maybe a little bit.

I have a problem with a pitch to mom bloggers that implies that a size 8 is a plus size.

dietbook1What exactly is a frame adjusted size 2?

The pitch also includes the by-now expected Oprah reference. Hullo. She can talk about her weight as much as SHE wants, and shill as many related products as SHE wants. The rest of you? Back off. Stop using her as a pitch point. She didn’t endorse your product and using her name to game the search engines is bad form. Granted, this was just a mention; the whole pitch wasn’t built around her, but still.

The other major sin of this pitch is the usual broad brush. As usual, it seems as though they sent a press release to a mom blogger list without understanding how it might be received. That’s stupid.

But the reason they get the BIG FAT LUMP OF COAL AWARD is for sending a press release that insults many of the women who will receive it by basically telling them that yes, that dress makes you look fat because you are.

Now, clearly I have an issue with the whole premise of the book, and I daresay the blogger who forwarded the pitch does too, but I am certain there are some bloggers who would not. Somewhere. The good news? If you are interested in this title, which will be published January 2, just wait a bit and I’ll bet you can get a REALLY good price at Better World Books, our good pitch award winner from last Friday. ‘Cause I just don’t see them flying off the shelves…

I’ll be back with a few more naughty and nice pitches before Christmas, but for now, please enjoy Bruce Springsteen’s version of Santa Claus is Coming to Town, the inspiration for today’s post title.

I see trees of green, good pitches too

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It is possible to do a good holiday pitch. Here are two examples.

First, the Green Christmas Award goes to Better World Books. The folks over at Alpha Mom sent me this pitch and wrote about it earlier this week.

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What’s good about this pitch? First and foremost, the content is a great match for the Alpha Mom site. Green, books, charity donation, carbon offset. Perfect. Second, the timing. It was sent to Alpha Mom in plenty of time to be included in the site’s holiday coverage. Finally, and you’ll hear this from me again about other good pitches: the brevity. It’s a good story, and the writer doesn’t wreck it with lots of fluff and puff. She lays it out in perfect order: need, pitch, facts, close. Well done, Margaret. I hope you have a very green and merry holiday.

I struggled a bit with the name for the next award, and even called she-who-knows-all, my mom, for a sanity check for my idea. She laughed at the original thought, but suggested a slight twist, so with no further ado, the Christmas Princess Award goes to the Nikon Look Good in Pictures campaign featuring Carson Kressley. Agency: MWW Group

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The pitch was sent to me by Allison Blass, the rep at MWW.  She noted in her email that the campaign had a number of different pitches geared toward style blogs, wedding blogs, travel blogs and so on. The one above was used for parenting blogs. It’s also not just a holiday pitch, although the family portraits one featured here has a holiday angle.

Here’s why it’s good.

The pitch is short and gets to the point right away. No cutesy schtick trying to make the blogger think Allison reads the blog. She probably does, knowing Allison, but even if she doesn’t,  it doesn’t matter because the pitch is clearly tailored to things most parents find relevant – how to take better pictures of their kids, family photos, vacation photos.

I watched the episode on family portraits. Carrie Sandoval, the professional photographer highlighted in the segment, is a mom and a blogger, and it looks like other segments use a similar tactic — using a photographer with whom the principal audience for the particular segment will identify.

My one concern is while I think the bloggers who get these pitches will check out the video series, I’m not sure how many will actually write about it as there is no incentive to do so. Sure, Carson is funny, but what’s the value-add to the blogger that leads her to give it valuable space on the blog? Folks already committed to Nikon may do something with it, just because. If it fits an editorial requirement for a blog or mainstream media outlet, it might get used. That’s especially relevant for wedding and travel blogs, for whom these topics are a perennial.

Otherwise? Not sure. We’ll see. The campaign was too new for Allison to tell me how it did, but  I hope she’ll be back to us with a report.

That’s it for today’s good holiday pitches. I’ll have one more over the weekend, but for  now, I’ll leave you with the Israel  Kamakawiwo`ole version of What a Wonderful World, the song referenced in today’s post title.

Mele Kalikimaka.

Three bad pitches, some snarky comments and a partridge in a pear tree

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It is generally NOT a good idea to use a holiday theme for your pitch, whether to mass media or bloggers, UNLESS your product is truly holiday-oriented or you are submitting it for holiday gift guides. Pumpkin carving kits, Christmas trees, Menorah and matzoh vendors, you get a pass, more or less. But… you have to target your pitch extremely well.

The rest of you? The holiday pitch is generally a bad idea. Engrave it on your eyeballs. Whatever it takes for you to remember that:

  • Everyone does not live in the USA;
  • Not all bloggers celebrate Christian holidays.

In an earlier post, I mentioned the complete cluelessness of wishing Canadian bloggers “Happy Thanksgiving” in late November given that Canada celebrates its Thanksgiving in mid-October. Our ragged band of Plimoth pilgrims and the somewhat arbitrary late November date? Not relevant.

July 4th? Canada celebrates its independence day a few days earlier, France on Bastille Day July 14th, and England? Well, England celebrates the day in November that some Guy did not blow up Parliament.

Christmas and Easter… Marketers seem to believe that everyone celebrates these Christian holy days.

Not so much.

No matter what the holiday, your holiday oriented pitch stands a pretty good chance of failing UNLESS you’ve done your research and know your target is receptive. For example, me and Christmas? You’ve got a pretty open invitation, and especially if you’ve got new Christmas music.

Most bad pitches ignore these simple rules of research and relevance. Holiday ones are simply more awful because they often try to be cute or clever, and fail. Generally massively.

As in mass email spams, ending with a cheery wish for a Merry Christmas. For example:

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Just your run of the mill boring holiday pitch. Except the blogger who received it is Jewish. When she forwarded the pitch to me, she commented that she’s not opposed to writing about other holiday experiences or religions. What offends her, and rightly so, is when companies claim they read the blog, in which she often mentions her religion, and then wish her personally a Merry Christmas.

The truth is, of course, that these holiday wishes are about as personal as mail addressed to “occupant.” It’s a mass-mail merge from a database that inserts the blogger’s name and blog name in the appropriate spots.

If you must do mass mailings about the suitability of your product as a gift, and I really wish you wouldn’t, there’s a reason why the word HOLIDAY is politically correct. Remember it. Holiday gift, not Christmas gift. Happy Holidays, not Merry Christmas.

“Best wishes for a safe and happy holiday” works really well for the whole month of December and generally doesn’t offend anyone.

Read the blog. How many times have you read those words here over the past few years.

If the PR agency that sent this next pitch was actually reading the blogs it spams on a regular basis, it wouldn’t have sent the pitch to the momblogger who forwarded it to me. Or at least I hope it wouldn’t have.

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Her comment to me was that the pitch wasn’t that bad, but it mentions the product is designed for African American men. Last she checked, her entire family is white.

She does post pictures of her family. Quite often. If the flack was reading the blog, even sporadically, she would have known this.

Read the blog. It’s the first step toward being relevant.

Our final bad pitch for today isn’t strictly speaking a holiday pitch, but it too uses the “cookie cutter” database approach with unintended humorous effect.

The pitch itself was long and had more than a few problems. But the best part, the very best part, was the salutation which ably illustrates the dangers of mass mail merges.

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Really, what more can I say?

For gross violations of mail merge technology and for so ably illustrating the flaws in a mass market, volume approach, these three pitches are awarded the Marketing Roadmaps HOLIDAY COOKIE CUTTER AWARD.

Next up: Not all holiday pitches are bad. What makes one good?

On the first day of bad pitch,

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Before we start this special holiday edition of good pitch/bad pitch,  a minor change of policy. While I will continue to protect the personal identities of the people who send the bad pitches, I will no longer be blacking out company and product names  when the pitch is particularly awful or the company is a multiple repeat offender.

Which is the case with both our tales today.

We’ll start with FLABuLESSU.

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There’s so much wrong with this pitch, it is hard to know where to start. I’ll leave aside my issues with the product itself, and focus on the why the pitch sent to mombloggers last week was so awful. If you’d like a good summary of the problems with the product, which is basically a girdle for your upper arms, check out PunditMom.

Back to the pitch.

There is a special place in hell for this type of news release, that uses celebrity names to attract attention, fool search engines and imply some sort of endorsement when in fact there is no such thing. The tactic was trotted out multiple times last fall about products tangentially related to Alaska governor Sarah Palin such as her eyewear, and appears on a regular basis for baby products, tied to whichever celebrity mom is about to or has recently given birth. Angelina Jolie… JLo… Jennifer Garner… Gwen Stefani… And so on.

In the FLABuLESSU pitch, this marginal tactic is then compounded by the subject matter, which is both trivial and offensive. Two extremely powerful and successful women and they want us to identify with them because we all have flabby arms? Puleez. It’s already a shady tactic, but this crosses over into the offensive.

To make matters worse, when a friend of mine emailed the company about how offensive the pitch was, she basically got a brush-off reply that many women love the product, which has been featured on Rachael Ray and in the NY Post. Okay then. That makes all the difference. I guess.

Except not. Neither Caroline Kennedy nor Oprah Winfrey has endorsed this product, and to use their names and images in this fashion is offensive and unethical public relations practice. Which is why the FLABuLESSU pitch gets the first-ever Marketing Roadmaps SCUMBAG AWARD.

And it’s too bad really.  I personally have known women traumatized by their arm flab.  I get it. Don’t agree, but get it. Product fills an unmet market need. Could have been successful. But there are so many better ways to reach out to the target market. Hi-jacking Ms. Kennedy and Ms. Winfrey was unnecessary.

Speaking of Rachael Ray, the PR agency that represents Every Day with Rachael Ray as well as some other food properties seems determined to bury blogger Erika Jurney with recipes, even after multiple email requests to cease and a blog post last May that minced no words. This month’s missives include holiday recipes from Rachael as well as another client.

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And then there’s this gem:

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Note the date. More than a few months after Erika’s rant about the recipes. And this is only a sample of the many, many pitches Erika has received from this agency, which gets the BURNT SUGAR COOKIE AWARD for not paying attention. Elizabeth, if you were reading Erika’s blog, you’d know that she doesn’t want your recipes.

Next up in our series: why holiday-themed pitches are rarely a good idea.