The Evil Marketer

AT&T announced today that it’s going to kill off the Cingular brand. That’s right — probably the most recognized mobile brand in the US, certainly among younger consumers, will soon disappear forever. It’s never easy for yours truly when a brand dies; when I think of all the time and energy invested by fellow evil marketers nurturing a shiny new brand from infancy, through the awkward tweens all the way to maturity, I get a little verklempt.

Oh Cingular I barely knew thee!

Though your claims of “Fewest Dropped Calls” were probably a load of crap and your customer service sucked so bad that New York booted you off the BBB list, your brand was so powerful that you still became the #1 US mobile carrier. Of course it helps that you gave us evil marketers such a healthy budget to work with — according to your quarterly reports, you spent nearly a billion dollars in the first 3 quarters of 2006 to acquire just over 4.6 million customers.

That’s $217 per new acquisition!

I wonder what percentage of my bill each month is for you to fool people into switching to your sub-par service? Don’t get me wrong — like any evil marketer I will gladly pay more for my products and services so that my money can be frittered away being dumped into outdated marketing efforts. After all we’re all having trouble justifying our ad budgets these days — the days of the wildly expensive and almost completely ineffective 30 second tv spot are numbered. We can get trackable, measurable returns from online advertising but those damn publishers don’t charge enough! How the hell are we supposed to spend $217 per new acquisition online with CPM inventory drying up??? We like CPM — it’s almost like tv ads, so it’s more comfortable and less scary than all those new, complicated online methods we have to deal with.

Don’t panic, my evil brethren. I’ve got the answer for you. Average ad buys may be plummeting, but there are so many more ways to spend our ad budgets online. Take affiliate marketing — you can pay a set price per acquisition and spend as much as you want. Believe me, if you offered a $200 bounty for new customers via one of the affiliate networks, you will be overwhelmed with niche affiliates pushing your brand on every person who hits their site, and the message will be targeted for that niche specifically. Mob marketing, my friends, is the future. What a “brand” is in this model will scare you — but we’ll talk about that later.

My one piece of advice for today is, to paraphrase Kubrick — learn to stop worrying and love the mob.

Love,
The Evil Marketer