Just a Friendly Reminder

When you are inundated with folks just "reaching out," know who to blame.

Quince.

Today I got a nice email from an online retailer called Quince. They wanted to show that they were thinking about me and passed along fashion suggestions for my summer getaway. “Escape in style with effortless looks for every destination.” Why was I shown a montage of slender, dour young women, draped in cotton and linen, being effortlessly elegant? Because a year and a half ago, I bought some sort of pot from Quince as a Christmas gift for my daughter. And they’ve been gracious enough to stay in touch.

Daily. About 550 times. My inboxes, like yours, are overrun with “special offers” and upsells. And, of course, just plain spam, much of it criminal or at least grossly deceptive.

Dr. Oz’s Miracle Fat Burner!
You’re a lucky winner.
Instant bowel release!
Salutations and humble greets, dear sir. Help me access hidden fortune.

As national politics and your spam box sadly demonstrate, there is no limit to humanity’s capacity for sleaze — or, evidently, humanity’s capacity to be grifted. But if only that were the worst of it. Fortunately, algorithmic filters capture most of the dross. Unfortunately, they don’t protect us from the obsessively well intentioned. I do not have a doctor visit, retail experience, customer service inquiry, billing notice or any transaction whatsoever that is not followed by a survey, exclusive offer or barrage of “friendly reminders” to do something or other before I forget.

It’s unbearable. And you know who’s to blame? End-stage capitalism? The Man? Taking prayer out of the schools? No. It’s my fault. Let us review.

Once upon a time, companies like Coca-Cola and United Airlines spent billions upon billions of dollars in advertising to artfully and indelibly mold their brand images. “Things go better with Coca-Cola.” “Fly the friendly skies,” with Rhapsody in Blue soaring in the background. To see these ads, if the brand calculated right, would not only leave viewers motivated, but elevated. Yeah. Those were those days. Twenty years ago, in an Advertising Age cover story and then in my 2009 book, I described The Chaos Scenario. After 300 years of insanely lucrative symbiosis, I predicted, the business models of mass media and mass advertising sectors were doomed to rapidly lose altitude en route to a crash landing. And so it has come to pass.

The internet and digital tools for ubiquitous self-publishing and distribution have all but obsoleted mass media. TV, newspapers, magazines, the record industry and even Hollywood are smoking heaps of wreckage. More than half of those billions of advertising dollars have been redirected toward Google, Meta, Apple et al. And the matter of brand image is no longer litigated through TV commercials and magazine ads. It all happens on Reddit, Yelp, Facebook, X and so on, where the actual customers relay their perceptions. Yes, seemingly unimaginable at the turn of the millennium, the inmates are running the asylum.

Together they have long since concluded that the Friendly Skies aren’t. More like the Hostile Skies. Oh, well.

But customers are not going away and marketers aren’t going to stop trying to cultivate them. And so, way back in the day, I prescribed an approach called Listenomics, in which businesses pay extremely close attention to what was being said on Twitter and Yelp about their images in the wild of the consumer psyche, and adjust their conduct accordingly. This approach was codified in my 2013 follow-up book, co-authored with Doug Levy, Can’t Buy Me Like. To distill it to its essence, the marketing model had to be switched from a megaphone to a stethoscope.

You know, “Enough about me. What do you think of me?”

One trenchant example was, indeed, United Airlines. But the pièce de résistance was a 2007 stunt of mine, and another Advertising Age cover story, called “Comcast Must Die.” After a particularly egregious experience with a cable installation I discovered that there was no system within Comcast to connect installers with phone agents and operations management, leaving customers trapped in an inescapable labyrinth of failure and frustration. So I started a blog subtly called Comcast Must Die allowing angry consumers to vent. But along with their horror stories, they were asked to leave their Comcast account numbers (and no other personal identifying info) for all the world to see. The company was thereby shamed into using a website called ComcastMustDie.com as a communications clearinghouse of last resort.

The cable juggernaut was essentially forced at saber point to embrace Listenomics, and subsequently invested tens of millions of dollars to allow its various tentacles to communicate with one another. Hahahaha. You’re welcome.

Yes, for many years I claimed credit for civilizing the barbaric corporate beast. But now I am apologizing, because it seems I have created a Frankenstein’s monster, who has wildly turned on me and all of us. True, most companies have all but ceased trying to manipulate us with dubious advertising claims and contrived images. But along the way to listening to us they commenced pestering the living daylight out of us. All nominally to keep their fingers on the pulse of the marketplace. It is unrelenting.

“We’d love to have your feedback!” Oh, really? So you can reward or punish low-paid frontline employees based on my 1-5 rating? Here’s my feedback: I actually do want to escape in style. Please, please, please leave me the fuck alone.