Detargeting

Here's a fascinating idea - adding banner ads to corporate emails. Let's briefly think through what's wrong with this. Take a highly targeted, personal, one-to-one comms medium (email) and dump a mass-marketing branding solution on top of it (banners). You've got all the elements of an unstrategy right there: a wasted opportunity (if you want to send commercial messages out with your corporate emails it's possible the sender knows a little bit about the recipient, at least enough to tailor the message), a nuisance cost that diminishes the utility of a previously adequate channel and a fairly serious chance to harm the credibility of both the advertised brand and the email sender. Best result I can see - corporate email gets used a bit less because it's slightly less useful and people spend a bit more time face to face. Or we get an AdBlock add-on to email that strips the banners out. Anyone working on that yet? You could probably sell it as an enterprise solution...

Comments

[Rick]

It's suprising this took so long to invent. It already looks like a very old idea, which if it had been launched in 1997 would at least have enjoyed 12 years of use before its inevitable failure this year.

[PaulSweeney]

A guy I know has being doing this for about 5 years http://www.ebrand.ie/