Got yet another email from the National Advertising Awards folks yesterday about the annual Young Creative, Interactive and Direct contest. It's a great and fun opportunity to do some blue sky work, maybe win an award, maybe even go to Cannes.
But what gets me is that, when it comes to really basic marketing, these folks have no idea what they're doing.
The email they send is a jpeg. That's it, that's all. An image, sitting in the preview pane of my Entourage. Or rather, it would be if Entourage automatically downloaded it. But as we all know, Entourage doesn't.
So what I see in my preview pane is this:
Yeah, that'll get my attention.
(So, by some stretch of the imagination, maybe I do click on "download picture." Maybe I finally see their clever creative. There's no link for me to click on, even though they apparently want me to do something. There's just NAA's clever print ad, sitting there like it's 1996.)
I tried to tell them this last year – that they needed to send something with at least some text, something designed for how email is used in this modern century, and got a nice email back saying that they valued my input. Yeah, sure.
In this day and age there's no excuse for ignoring an everyday marketing reality, something we're all aware of as users when it comes to the medium of email. NAA isn't the only organization that's guilty of wasting time, money and energy like this, but they're one that should know better.
Scott