Met an ex-colleague yesterday. An unexpected pleasure, and a quick catch-up. She has been working for the same company for the last twelve years. It would be fair to say the company has been successful in this time. The company has decided to shut its UK operation, and she is being made redundant along with all other staff.
The redundancy package is exactly the legal minimum, which is a fixed, and relatively small, amount of money for each year of employment, and in her case is equivalent to little more than one month’s salary.
Then, just before the notice period was due to begin, head office asked her to take on a new project, as there was noone else available with the appropriate skills or experience.
Aside from the rights and wrongs, there will be a lot of people – like me – whose picture of this well-known and hitherto well-respected company, will be completely altered by the story we hear from people we know and trust. The company’s reputation in this country is toast, and it really would _not_ have cost a lot of money to have prevented that happening.
picture: net_efekt
At a trade show yesterday, someone rolled a large furry dice on the floor in front of me, and said in a cheery voice ‘Talk to us today and get free data cleansing’.
They were talking about working with names and addresses of customers and prospects. They used the metaphor of chance, and positioned data cleansing as a freeby, an incentive. Awkwardly I blurted something about how wrong I thought it was to value personal data that way, and moved on.
The company isn’t doing anything illegal, and they are honestly trying to grow their business and help their clients. They aren’t bad people, they’re just reflecting the perceptions of their clients and the marketplace.
It’s not good, and I wish I knew how to change it.
Encouraging results for a recent test of personalised URLS and landing pages with a subscription publisher. It looks like there’s a 20% uplift on response, despite a few glitches on the way. Some good learnings, and I hope it paves the way to a roll-out and some more campaigns. Time to write the case study …
picture: jurvetson
A couple of new services have launched for UK direct marketers. They both promise to help businesses grow their customer base. They are data products, and they analyse, clean and update existing data, and bring in third-party data for recruitment activity. In one, they promise a quick and easy template ‘for first timers’, and in the next they say that ‘a typical database … could be enhanced and readied for a mailout in 15 minutes’. Oh, and as a special introductory offer, you can get ‘two records for the price of one until 31 August’.
Sorry, it’s not acceptable to let data management be run by a ‘first timer’. Haven’t we learned that pricing of data isn’t about quantity, it should be about quality? This commoditisation of data is a brilliant way of producing junk mail, and I thought we’ d learned that lesson already.
picture: philipn
Meeting tomorrow to wrap up a current campaign where we’ve got some excellent results for our clients. We’ve also learned a few lessons. It’s interesting watching the dynamics in this kind of meeting. Sometimes people are so careful to ensure that they are not seen to have made any mistakes, that they forget to learn. Sometimes I am one of those people
A little research in recent days has unearthed some fantastic ideas and examples of where we could take data-driven personalisation. Most of the ideas are from the US, but there are some in Hong Kong and Australia too – here’s one of them from Eliot Harper. I would love to bring them to the UK. At the moment, some of the ideas are so far ahead of our practice in this country, that they’d be seen as gimmicks with no possible application by almost everyone. And that ‘almost’ is the encouraging part, because there are a couple of clients and agencies here that do understand. It’s good to see that there is a pathway to the future.
picture: Jan Tik
Watching – and sharing – the anger at the abuse of privilege shown by the UK’s MPs, it’s remarkable how much time it’s taken for any of the main party leaders to take a credible position. Today, as the second set of details of his members’ expenses are made public, the leader of the opposition has declared that he will consider imposing penalties on his party. Meanwhile the Prime Minister has finally managed to say sorry, but has made no public statement about restitution or punishment.
At the moment, the leadership opportunity is to mitigate and minimise damage. Whilst Gordon Brown lurks, not just his party’s, but parliament’s reputation continues to freefall.
picture: OakleyOriginals
Third call today from Everest, telling me that ‘they are in my area’ and offering an appointment. Fair enough, I did get a quotation from them some months ago. Unfairly, I’ve asked them each time not to call me again. Today, they say ‘oh we have more than one list, so we can only take you off one list at a time’. Tried to point out that this is at best a mis-reading of current law, asked to speak to a supervisor, all the usual stuff. They are not listening. They (and note how I’ve already objectified the company as some kind of personal enemy) are not prepared to accept my feedback or my request, and that means I’m going to look for other ways to tell the story. Everest, there is a better way of doing this, and you could start with your permission policies and codes of practice.
picture: vlima.com
Two pieces of news, next to each other in the same newsletter: one talks about a rise in the number of complaints from consumers about direct mail, and database companies; the other is the launch of a new data management service aimed at ‘data novices’. It’s worse than ironic. How do we get in front of the data novices to make sure they don’t create even more complaints from inappropriate, or even illegal use of data? The best service we can offer the novice is education and skill. It’s not just cheaper than a new database tool, it’s much more cost-effective, and a lot less risky.
picture: Andrew Currie
There’s an interesting exchange going on at LinkedIn about one-to-one personalised marketing.
This is the line from one of the US contributors that rocked me back in my chair:
“About 4 yrs ago I worked at a DM agency and every campaign included a personalized VDP print DMailing, a minisite with a trackable specific URL, followed by an eblast and finally another call to action printed 4pg brochure drawing them back to the website to buy the products.
I am now starting my own business and without even giving it any thought this is exactly my marketing plan…of course scaled down.”
And here I am in the UK looking at a grand total of 4 published case studies of work that looks like this – one of which, by the way, increased marketing ROI by more than 500%, and generated £1m in incremental profit, and won awards – and talking to lots of people who think it’s a good idea but aren’t doing it yet.
It’s time to catch up, there’s money to be made out there …
picture: greenishseal
