Foul Shot for Ovitz?
When you think "Jeeves," what thoughts come to mind?
"How about stuffy, unappealing, servile, uptight, or just plain boring?" you respond.
C'mon, now the guy had a Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade balloon float in his likeness; do you call that boring?
"Mmm-hmmm...yep...that's kinda boring," you reiterate.
OK -- maybe you're not expanding your mind enough. If you were, you'd see the obvious correlations between Jeeves, the AskJeeves.com spokescharacter, and a rough 'n' tumble game of hoops.
Michael Ovitz did. Yes, the Hollywood power broker and ex-Disney prez knows a great match when he sees it. That's why, according to a July 26 Business Week article, "the elegantly dressed servant got a gig answering sports-trivia questions on the Jumbotron at [LA] Lakers' games" recently. Also through his technology-investment firm, Lynx Technology Group, and his management company, Artists Management Group, Ovitz hammered out a deal making NBA player, Jason Kidd and tennis champ, Pete Sampras spokes-sports-guys for Jeeves.
Apparently, lots of dot-coms have begun relying on the services of talent agents lately; however, as mentioned in the Biz Week story, Jeeves and other Internet firms are paying the agents and their famous spokes-folks partially or completely in stock. Now, that's a real shame. I mean, those poor souls in Hollywood and the world of pro sports have been scraping by on meager earnings to begin with, and now this!
This Ovitz guy could be onto something, though. I know that when I think of the words intuitive, reliable, and reserved, I think AskJeeves.com. And there's no doubt that the same words pop into my head whenever professional athletes, particularly b-ball and tennis players, are mentioned. The thing is, you'd think Ovitz could have chosen more appropriate and well-known sports stars to boost the Jeeves brand. It's just too bad Dennis Rodman and John McEnroe weren't available.
Get off 'a My Intellectual Property!
Verio Says Cheerio to Best Practices
It may sound like an oxymoronic thought, but I'd like to think that Internet marketers have the scruples to police themselves when it comes to consumer privacy on the Web. I'm not so sure anymore.
The slimy tactics of Verio, the ISP, Web hosting and site building firm, have done it. Register.com has found it necessary to send the vile privacy violators "two 'cease and desist' letters," according to a July 20 Wall Street Journal report. Under the guise of "marketing as any other player would try to," Verio literally grabbed "Whois" owner information from individual domain name profiles and added it to its database for advertising purposes.
Can you imagine the eye-glaze that must have formed on the low-level lackey responsible for copying and pasting countless lines of customer info into Verio's database? Man, I just hope, for some unsuspecting intern's sake, that the Verio vermin got a coder to write a script to retrieve those names, email addresses and phone numbers.
What's more unbelievable, the company argues that because the Register.com profile data are available on the site, free of charge, it is public domain. Although the Journal piece notes that the registration "information is available on the site but appears with a disclaimer that says it cannot be used for marketing purposes," official Lowbrow Lowdown Site-Scourers have yet to discover a Register.com disclaimer that strictly prohibits third parties from promotional usage of the data. The eagle-eyes did, however, come across this statement within the Register.com "Registration Agreement":
On second thought, Register.com's practices don't seem too kosher, either.
Either way, the victims in the end are the domain registrants, many of whom claim to have received spam and unsolicited phone calls at home from Verio. "Verio denied sending unsolicited e-mail but conceded it used telemarketing and direct mail," the Journal story reports.
It's curious, the fact that spam has become more vilified than even more insidious practices like unsolicited telemarketing to private homes, and Hormel's plans to "parlay young people's obsession with the iconic [Spam] brand name into actual sales."
(Check out the July 31 print edition of Advertising Age.)
From the looks of it, Ed Norton and Ralph Kramden would rather be smokin' indo and sippin' on gin n' juice than playing "Swanee River" for the umpteenth time. From the looks of the latest TV Land ad onslaught, that is.
And let's get to the real point of these TV Land ads. They're damn funny, pure and simple. Which leads to another related point and recent story. This comedic ad phenomenon is…well, a joke. Consider the tale of 
...maybe you just wish you could rake in some shell oil co bux yourself, so you wouldn'g get stuck when the rest of the bushwah rolls down on the overbuilt, overhyped, way redundant state of dotcommage.
The forward-looking clean-freaks have already joined with the likes of Burger King and Starbucks Coffee through co-branding efforts. Blockbuster Video is next on the list to build stores in Lucy's "micromalls."