Nobody’s perfect, not even the company that runs with the motto “don’t be evil”. Google wrote me a letter, dated October 7, that gives me, a user of google maps, a €50 voucher to advertize using Google AdWords. So far, so generous. The voucher is valid until 31 October … and only arrived this afternoon, a day before expiration.
No matter how you slice it, not a great marketing campaign.
They tell me I only need three minutes to get going. If a decent adline only took three minutes to write, then we’d only need about 4.7 copywriters world-wide to meet all needs.
If they’re trying to push me to sign up quickly, they need to learn some more about how different people tick. I’d be happy to introduce them to the Enneagram. If they were truly interested in my custom, they might even have invested the much less than three minutes to find out who lives at my address.
The letter and voucher provide a wonderful example of how you can push the buttons of someone with my personality structure, the Peacemaker in the Enneagram: leave my name off the letter (being overlooked), put me under pressure for a quick decision (hello, Mr Passive Aggressive!)
It gives me pause for thought about how I market my services to clients. Do I take care to get their name right? Do I give them time to take decisions? Am I respectful about their time?
What have you learned from marketing that rubbed you up the wrong way?
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don’t be evil- that motto is funny, because i’v noticed its never really showing out there on search conneced to adwords.
conveniently extracted?
I got a coupon for $20 or so to start a adwords campaign-but in $10 of my own money-and its been 3 weeks -i’m in a sandbox with no ads running and thousands of keywords chosen.
don’t be evil
do the math, google repeats this scenerio by the billions and …. using other people’s money can use my 10 dollars indefinently as loan capital.
nice. 🙂
in the usa-i REALLY WISH- the attorney general would slam the **** out of that company and that practice (among dozens of other evil behaviors), such as removing voice customer service from adwords (nice going google)….
I’m sorry to hear about your poor experience with Google AdWords. However, they can’t guarantee that people will click your ads. There’s a craft to making a good short ad; copywriting can be learned. It just takes more than the three minutes they mentioned in their letter to me.
I’m responsible for what I do or leave undone. In my case I decided not to succumb to their three minute enticement late on a Friday afternoon.
I don’t believe that Google is evil. It seems to overreach from time to time and gets slapped back. The unfortunate aspect is choosing such a guiding motto: it sets an impossibly high standard to meet every day and what constitutes evil is not something that everyone is going to agree on.