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Is Your Brand Guilty of These Annoying Marketing Tactics?

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Hosted By

Anna Hrach

Convince & Convert
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In this “Pardon the Marketing” edition of the Content Experience Show, co-hosts Randy Frisch and Anna Hrach debate the most annoying marketing tactics.

Is Your Brand Guilty of These Annoying Marketing Tactics?

‘Pardon the Marketing’ Returns

What overused, invasive, or misapplied marketing ploy makes you cringe every single time? Is it the wastefulness of direct mail? The creepy attempts at personalization in sales emails? And what is it about these tactics that makes them such a popular choice for marketers, and yet so ineffectual?
In this special episode, Anna and Randy bring back another game of “Pardon the Marketing” with a fresh theme: annoying marketing tactics. For each two-minute round, our hosts dig into what they hate (or love) most about controversial strategies and tools like full-page takeover ads, landing pages, LinkedIn messaging, smart speakers, social media ads, direct mail, unskippable YouTube ads, movie trailers, CTAs, and sales emails.
Join Randy and Anna as they debate the best and the worst of the most annoying marketing tactics. Then, weigh in yourself on social media using #conex and #pardonthemarketing to let them know if you agree!

In This Episode

  • The worst things about full-page takeover ads.
  • What makes some LinkedIn spam messages worse than others.
  • Thoughts on Google Home, privacy, and where smart speakers should and shouldn’t be.
  • Theories on what makes Instagram ads more tolerable than other social ads.
  • Components of a strong CTA.
  • How marketing personalization changed the game (and upped the difficulty) for salespeople.
  • The pros and cons of other controversial marketing tactics like direct mail, unskippable YouTube ads, and movie previews.

Quotes From This Episode

“Should we expect Instagram will eventually be lower quality as it’s diluted and they get more ads, or are they just somehow targeting us at a whole new level?” – @randyfrisch
'Click Here' doesn't say anything to anybody. The more contextual the better, and the more descriptive the better. Click To Tweet
“Where does the right place for Google Home begin, and where does it end?” – @randyfrisch

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Episode Transcript

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Randy

Welcome to the Conex Podcast. This is one of our special episodes, Anna. This is where we get to do the Pardon The Interruption, but we actually had a whole brainstorm leading into this, because this form of our podcast is taking off. I even had Jay Baer tell me that we should continue doing this every week, but we love our guests so we’re going to still slide this in, but it’s now got a formal name. This is now called Pardon the Marketing, because it’s not just about being interrupted by the buzzer, it’s the fact that we are pardoning the marketing that is going on out there.

Randy

We figured with that we could have some fun today, so this was your idea. Tell people the topic that we have for today.

Anna

All right. So the topic that we have for today is basically annoying marketing tactics. We’re kind of inspired by our last podcast with Mark Schaefer and Marketing Rebellion and we kind of touched on some of the ways that maybe marketing hasn’t quite caught up or some of the things that are relics of the past that people still do and so we wanted to kind of touch on maybe some things that kind of piss us off a little.

Randy

Yeah, those things that we kind of say fuck it. Kind of like the book I wrote. I know it’s… we’re not going to drop F-bombs that much, don’t worry if you don’t like those curse words. I promise to behave a little bit, but we’ve got 10 items. If you haven’t heard this format of podcasts from us before, this is how it runs down, literally runs down because the clock’s going down. Each time, we pick a topic and then the other person who challenges with that topic presents two minutes for a response and it’s basically the idea to rant about how you feel about that topic.

Randy

So today we are going to talk about how much do you hate fill in the blank, and then the other person has about two minutes. We end up with a little bit of back and forth during that time, so we are going to kick it off here in about 10 seconds. Anna, are you ready?

Anna

I am so ready. I have the buzzer this time.

Randy

I know.

Anna

I have the power.

Randy

Let’s be honest. The reason you have the buzzer is because I kept screwing it up so which could easily have been our first item that you hate, but we’ll skip over hating the Apple iPhone alarm clock and whatnot. Well, even just the whole alarm clock and everything is terrible. But we’re going in the wrong direction. This is Pardon the Marketing, not Pardon the iPhone.

Anna

Right.

Randy

We’re going to kick it off here. I’ve got the first one for you.

Anna

All right.

Randy

You got the buzzer ready to go? You got the . . .?

Anna

The buzzer is ready.

Randy

All right. Anna’s on the clock for two minutes. I want you to first of all rate every time, so rate how much do you hate full page takeover ads? Those ads that take over the entire page.

Anna

I don’t know. We might need a whole show on this actually. I’m going to go ahead and let’s say if like 10 is loathe the most and one is like slight annoyance, I’m going to go ahead and give them a solid nine to a 10 depending on what it is. The reason why these kill me is because back in the day, not even that long ago, 15 years ago when banner ads first surfaced it was like, oh, we’ll put something at the top, or, oh, we’ll put something cool on the side rail or, oh, we’ll do this cool static thing here. Then all the sudden people were just like, hey, that worked. Let’s add more shit to this page. And, hey, you’re trying to read about this horrific accident down the street from you, oh, nope, great time to scroll the whole page down and show you this great President’s Day weekend sale at this furniture store.

Anna

The timing of it is just so ludicrous sometimes and it is so annoying because there’s never any sort of rhyme or reason to it, it’s just frustrating and I really would love to hear from a brand who uses them and it works so exceptionally well that they keep interrupting my news and my flow. But Randy, I would love to hear. You have like 46 seconds.

Randy

That was passionate. I’m surprised that was only a nine based on your voice. I thought it could have been a 13. I agree with you unless it’s used well. Every once in a while I can even go to like an offline experience. Sometimes in newspapers when it’s a full page ad from a brand you don’t expect and they’ve used it in a clever way, I admire. Sometimes I go to websites and they’ve taken over the whole background of the page in a very clever way. I like that. I like exit intent, where it’s essentially like an ad. So I think we have to be clever how we use it, but when we’re lazy and we just expect that you care because it’s all I’m showing you, I hate that too.

Anna

Yeah. It’s… Oh. Look at that.

Randy

There we go. You don’t even get to pipe back in.

Anna

Dammit. I agree with you.

Randy

Two more minutes. What do we got? What have you got for me?

Anna

Two minutes, Randy. Are you ready?

Randy

Hit me.

Anna

Two minutes. Landing pages.

Randy

Oh, landing pages. I wasn’t expecting that one. Okay. I mean, this is an area that I’m going to kind of give some context first. So overall, my rating for a landing page is not landing pages overall, because I think there is very good use for landing page when we’re trying to test different experiences.

Anna

Totally.

Randy

What I believe is that landing pages were not built for gating content. What I hate is it’s kind of like, okay, first I’m going to tell you everything, then I’m going to get you to fill out a form and then I’m going to take you to the content where you’re going to probably have to download it from somewhere else anyways. The idea of a landing page when it comes to gating content, it’s one of those things where we adapted it and we’re like, “I think I can make this work,” and then all the sudden we delivered just a terrible experience.

Randy

My hate again, high is the hate, I’m going to give it a seven and a half, which doesn’t show how much I hate it, but it’s just because I understand why people feel the need to do that and I think that’s one of the problems that we have to help overcome in marketing departments is it’s very tricky to produce these landing pages, to get them out in time.

Randy

I actually once sat with a customer of ours and it was the CMO being pitched by their team on their challenge with landing pages for gating content. It was a debate as to what comes first. It was a chicken and an egg situation. It’s like to build the landing page I need the final assets. To build the final asset, I need the landing page. Vice versa. It’s a very complex issue. I don’t think we can solve it in two minutes. I don’t know. You got some thoughts?

Anna

Yeah. I think I agree with you. I think context is everything and I think a lot of times the user experience and the content flow on landing pages is just terrible. There’s no sort of rhyme or reason or things are introduced at random times, and yeah, it’s all about context for me. I don’t think I have… I’ll go with a five. Oh.

Randy

Oh. We’re going to have to stop there. We’re going to have to stop there. Listen. As you’re following along with this, the hashtag is Conex and let us know what you thought on those landing pages because we’d love to see more participation, even though this podcast lives on on how you feel about some of these things. So the hashtag again is Conex and as well you can hashtag Pardon the Marketing.

Randy

Okay, so next one here. I’m going to hit you. Two minutes on the timer please.

Anna

Yep.

Randy

Tell me how much you hate spammed LinkedIn messages. I’m talking about the ones that come into our inbox that in theory we welcome because you’re now my connection or because you’ve bought enough . . .

Anna

Yeah. Oh man. I don’t know. Sometimes they’re real entertaining and I do value them for that. I will say my hatred level for them when they are carefully constructed, they’ve shown some research, they’ve shown that they know me, it’s like a two. I still don’t love being sold to in that manner, but the fact that they’ve taken some time to actually look at my profile and get to know me or they know something about me really drastically decreases that.

Anna

When it’s like hilariously wrong, like Dear Business Owner, we love the things that you’re doing. Generic. I just kind of laugh at those and those are maybe like a three. But I think the ones that are just kind of out of the blue, it’s in the invitation, it’s not even after we’ve connected, it’s sort of like the sale in the invitation. They don’t even know me, we don’t have any connections. They just go straight for the sale. Those I get really kind of sick of and it’s turning LinkedIn into just this kind of smarmy gross platform sometimes when people do that, and that’s kind of a shame because it’s a really beneficial platform. You probably get a ton of LinkedIn mail though.

Randy

Oh yeah. I get everything from insane offers to hello, like that’s literally the message sometimes. Hello. I think to myself, all right, that one definitely caught my attention, but what do you want?

Anna

Yeah, hello.

Randy

It’s tricky. LinkedIn is not a text messaging platform, it’s also not robust enough to be an email platform, so we have to be really smart about how we use it, because we have one opportunity to break through and once you do, a great conversation can start. There we go. We’re finished on that now, right.

Anna

Yeah.

Randy

All right. Who’s next? I think…

Anna

You are, yeah.

Randy

What do you got?

Anna

All right. You ready? Two minutes. I want to hear your rating and thoughts on Google Voice or any voice app really.

Randy

All right. You know what? I’m going to go… so first of all, this is the hate meter so I’m going to score low because I actually don’t mind it, but I’m going to give a cautious three, which would be like a seven of a positive. Here’s why. First off, I’m conflicted. The problem I have in my own house now, I think we have like six of these things. I was talking to my son the other day and he’s like, “I really think we need them in our bathrooms.” It’s just like where do we end? Where do we end? Where does the right place for Google Home begin and where does it end at the end of the day? I think what I like about it is it’s making it a lot easier to play music on demand, it’s making it a lot easier to find out the weather. It’s making it a lot easier to even just ask for information on the fly, but there’s definitely some concerns by audiences out there in terms of what are they listening to.

Randy

This was a really weird one. I know there’s this big Big Brother fear and my wife and I were watching a television ad the other night. We have a Google Home in our bedroom and all the sudden there was an ad for mosquito repellent clothing, which we thought was the coolest thing ever.

Anna

That is cool.

Randy

That would be awesome for our kids. So I opened up my phone, opened up Google Chrome, start typing mosquito, M-O-S-Q and it auto-replaced mosquito… anyways it auto-replaced the whole term and we looked at each other and we’re like no way. How is that… how would that be the number one search result? We’re just like, it’s listening. So that’s why I’m cautiously optimistic.

Anna

Yeah. I think same. I waiver back and forth between super beneficial and Skynet. I’m just curious about why your son wants one in the bathroom. Did you get an answer? Oh, we’ll never know.

Randy

I feel like this is a good time to finish the answer. We did find out why and it’s because as he said, that’s where I go first thing in the morning and I want to know who won the sports game. That’s fair.

Anna

That’s pretty cute.

Randy

Anyway. We’ve got to take a short break here. I should have left that as a cliffhanger.

Anna

That’s true.

Randy

Why do we need a Google Home in the bathroom? We’ve got six more of these items that we’re going to leave to the second half of the show right after we hear from some of our sponsors on today’s episode of Pardon the Marketing Conex edition.

Jay

Hi friends, this is Jay Baer from Convince & Convert reminding you that this show, the Conex Show Podcast is brought to you by Uberflip, the number one content experience platform. Do you ever wonder how content experience effects your marketing results? Well you can find out in the first ever content experience report, where Uberflip uncovers eight data science backed insights to boost your content engagement and your conversions. It’s a killer report and you do not want to miss it. Get your free copy right now at uberflip.com/conexshowreport. That’s uberflip.com/conexshowreport.

Jay

The show is also brought to you by our team at Convince & Convert Consulting. If you’ve got a terrific content marketing program but you want to take it to the very next level, we can help. Convince & Convert works with the world’s most iconic brands to increase the effectiveness of their content marketing, social media marketing, digital marketing, and word of mouth marketing. Find us at convinceandconvert.com.

Anna

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Randy

All right, Anna. We are back here on Pardon the Marketing Conex Edition. We are talking about areas that just bother us in marketing and the next two that I know we talked about hitting each other up kind of revolves around advertising. I want you to tell me what your feeling is these days of these unskippable YouTube ads. The ones where you’ve got to watch the full ad.

Anna

Yeah, like minute 30-ish. No, I feel like I get the ones that are like a minute 30.

Randy

Oh they hate you.

Anna

I know. I think they do. You know, here’s the thing. I watch a lot of YouTube. It is actually quickly overtaking regular TV for me. I love the quick bite sized pieces of content. I love the short form content. It’s easier for me to jump back and forth or get into a piece of content. I don’t love it, but I will put up with it because I value the content that I’m about to watch. So I’m going to rate these at like a three, which is weird, but if I don’t feel like that piece of content is worth sitting through the whole minute 30 ad or even 15 second ad, I just bounce. I don’t even launch that ad.

Randy

Can we get rid of them though? If I were to pay for YouTube Premium, which I don’t, but they always-

Anna

I think you can.

Randy

Would that kill the ads?

Anna

It would indeed. Right.

Randy

How much is YouTube Premium? I pay, what $12, $13 now for Netflix happily.

Anna

But it goes to show you how much I value the freemium model and I’m willing to sit through those ads because I haven’t purchased YouTube Red, even though there’s like original content on there.

Randy

Yeah. I don’t know. I think it’s a challenge of once something is priced at a certain level we’re only willing to pay so much more. If you asked me today how much I pay for Netflix, if I didn’t know, I’d probably say like $50 a month. Right?

Anna

Oh yeah.

Randy

For sure. I’d be like for sure. But now the idea of charging me one more dollar to get me up from like $11 to $12 or whatever it is now I’d be like, “Are you kidding me?”

Anna

Really. I happily pay that. I’m like you want another dollar out of me? Done.

Randy

I’m actually fine with it.

Anna

You take my money, Netflix. I love you.

Randy

I know. I have to tell my parents who are using one of my log-ins to pay me that buck, right.

Anna

Right. Yeah. That’s tax.

Randy

There you go. There you go. But I lined it up. We’re going to keep talking about ads. You got a different ad one for me right?

Anna

Yeah. This one is for you. Speaking of ads, let’s go ahead and talk about the endless commercials and trailers before movies, like in theater movies.

Randy

So first off, for those who listened to our last podcast, it was with Mark Schaefer. This one kind of set us into this Pardon the Marketing episode where we’re hitting on all these things. I used to love those commercials that came before the movie.

Anna

Yeah.

Randy

I love trailers first of all. I think trailers are always great, especially when they are contextual to the movie I’m seeing.

Anna

Oh yeah.

Randy

But the ads now are no longer great. They’re just ads. I am so disappointed because now I think to myself about when do I actually have to come. A lot of the theaters, I don’t know if this is where you live, they now have reserved seating, so you don’t have to get there early. I’m starting to realize, okay, well how long will the ads be until the trailers come and I’m going to time it all to skip it, which to me is no different than what I do at home when I skip over commercials at home and the reason they spent more ads in the movie theater is because I was skipping the ones at home. So we have to stay smart about these ads. We’ve got to be creative and let our juices flow.

Anna

Yeah, I agree. What’s funny actually is same thing. Yeah, every movie theater that my husband and I go to, we reserve our seats so we don’t have to deal with it, but we had a glitch when we went to go see Endgame, so we were at the theater, in the theater the power goes out on the whole block.

Randy

No.

Anna

I scramble and get the last two seats at another theater, an AMC down the street. I’m like, okay, great. We go there and I forgot that AMC has literally 30 minutes of commercials and trailers before the movie, so now the three hour movie was like three hours and 45 minutes and I was like, “Oh my god. What am I going to do?” It stressed me out because I was like I forgot there were so many. Now I’m here forever.

Randy

Wow. Honestly, back to YouTube Premium, I would pay a premium not to have ads at the movies. Just give me 10 more minutes of trailers. All right. Let’s keep going here. One more ad one I think we decided.

Anna

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Randy

This one, I’m curious where you’re going to live on this one. Instagram ads.

Anna

I like Instagram ads. I feel like I don’t know if it’s just who I follow or what, but I feel like those brands that do target me do so really well. I have actually purchased things based off of seeing Instagram ads before. I don’t mind when they pop up in my stories feed. I like the way that people are approaching them. They’re far more visual. They tell more stories. I feel like the market for Instagram ads hasn’t become so flooded yet. I’m going to write it down at a one. I do not mind Instagram ads.

Randy

That’s interesting. It’s kind of like the infomercial. Do you know what I mean?

Anna

Yeah.

Randy

You’re like, wait, I want to see what this thing does and I want to see what the offer is.

Anna

But wait, there’s more.

Randy

One of the first 20 people to call.

Anna

Yeah.

Randy

It’s true. I don’t know how… it’s still Facebook behind all of this and I don’t want Facebook ads so why do I like Instagram ads?

Anna

There are terrible ads on Facebook.

Randy

I know. So what’s happened? Is it is a quantity versus quality issue? Should we expect Instagram will eventually be lower quality as it’s diluted and they get more ads or are they just somehow targeting us at a whole new level? Or is it the confined amount of space that they have to work with and the format that we like on Instagram in general that to be honest, I like Instagram better than Facebook to begin with? It’s a tricky one to figure out. I find I like the ads that I scroll through in my photos more than I like the story ads. The story ads feel a little too much like they’re trying to promote something.

Anna

Sometimes. I’ve also watched like three Instagram ads, or three Instagram story ads and been like oh that wasn’t like a friend. That totally looked like something somebody would post that I know. I do appreciate it. I still feel like it’s pretty good. It’s not the… Well, we’ll never know.

Randy

We won’t know. We won’t know. But, we’ve got a few more here.

Anna

Yeah.

Randy

There was so much hate today. So much hate. Although that was a little bit of like.

Anna

There was some love.

Randy

There was a little bit of love for Instagram ads.

Anna

All right. So let’s go ahead, Randy. This one is over to you and you have two minutes. I want to hear your thoughts on generic calls to action, like click here.

Randy

Click here. You know it’s funny. We were chatting about this on my marketing team a couple of weeks ago because we recently bought a platform called Optimizely.

Anna

Yeah, great platform.

Randy

It’s awesome. Optimizely lets us, as it sounds, optimize our call to actions as well as different aspects of our web page and things like that. There was a big debate because we changed our requested demo button to start here. And apparently Optimizely has done many tests to tell people start here is the best click through rate out of any type of button that you could do. Apparently if you go to Optimizely’s site that’s what you’ll see. But to me, I also wonder if sometimes it’s misleading and I think sometimes with this generic CTAs we just try and plug the same CTA every time because we know what’s optimized versus what am I actually offering right now.

Randy

As an example, with Uberflip, we don’t offer a free trial, so you’re not actually starting using the platform. I said, “Well, are we misguiding? Are we getting clicks with the wrong action?” I would suggest the same thing may be happening more broadly. Take our content that we put out. This show is all about the content experience, the right CTA ensures that someone knows what they will be given and that may be much more than start here or subscribe. What’s your thoughts on this, because this could be a 30-minute one.

Anna

I… one, click here needs to go away forever. I don’t care the circumstance. I think to your point the more contextual the better, and the more descriptive the better. Bottom line, click here doesn’t say anything to anybody. People already know that function, they know what to do with it, but I think to your point, yes, you can’t just go and make calls to action super random and interesting because that doesn’t work either. They have to be relevant, they have to be done well. And that’s it.

Randy

Done well. Done well.

Anna

Done well.

Randy

Well said. Well done. All right. All right. I think we get one more each so we’ve got to be selective about these last two here. I’ve got one. I may have to contextualize this one as well coming off of our CTA contextualization.

Anna

It’s always good when we have to start this with a disclaimer.

Randy

Exactly. Well it’s direct mail but there’s so many types of direct mail today, right. There’s the direct mail that comes to us in our homes, but then there’s also the direct mail that is literally directly mailed to each of us in a more personalized way, like more tactile marketing at our desks at work. Rate both if you can in just two minutes.

Anna

All right, easy. Direct mail that I receive to my home, like for residential personal purposes, I could not rate that more of a ten than possible. If we could go to an 11 like Spinal Tap I totally would, but in like a bad way.

Randy

You mean you don’t want to eat Subway seven days a week with coupons for every day?

Anna

Terrible example, because who wouldn’t? No. I don’t understand how I can opt out of spam email but I cannot tell companies to please stop wasting finite resources on me with marketing messages that won’t work.

Anna

On the other hand, tactile marketing things that I get, like for instance, the beautiful Uberflip thank you gift from Conex last year. I’ll take those all day, please. They’re beautiful, especially when yours contains some lime that was delicious. I think doing those in really personal ways is… it’s amazing and I like to see the comeback of that. But I’m curious what your thoughts are, both on please rank them.

Randy

Yeah, you’re right. It’s funny to think about how we have GDPR to protect our data and ensure that people are only emailing us in certain ways when we’ve opted in, but I don’t know what we would call the ones at home, like Tree DPR or something, like save the trees?

Anna

Yeah. I want to.

Randy

I just came up with that on the fly, I apologize for the cheese there.

Anna

It’s a thing now.

Randy

Exactly. I’m preparing for Tree DPR. No, I agree with the home. To be honest, I just throw it out. I’m probably throwing out bills and checks and things like that at the same time, but the bottom line is, that’s the way of the past. We are starting to expect more and more personalized experiences and there’s great companies. Actually remember when we had Jason from UviaUs? That was a great podcast and a great example of being smarter. Was that a buzzer? Oh no. Or was that someone texting you before?

Anna

That was somebody texting me before. There’s no takes backsies on this one.

Randy

No problem, it’s fine. One day as we say, this podcast will be able to afford a real legit timer that’s not built into our iPhone.

Anna

Hey, you know what? This is real, in real time and it’s authentic and it’s genuine.

Randy

Absolutely.

Anna

There’s no script here.

Randy

The challenge that we have here is we can’t put our phones on do not disturb, otherwise the buzzer doesn’t…

Anna

Right. It won’t ring, yeah.

Randy

People are sitting there being like, “Ah, I get it.” All right.

Anna

Yeah. All right. Last one. The text will not come up, I don’t think. Knock on all the things. All right, Randy. This is the last one. Take us home on this one. I want to know in two minutes or less, I don’t know if you’re going to have two minutes for this, but sales emails. Pure sales from sales people.

Randy

Okay. I’m going to go middle of the road. I’m going to give it a five and that’s probably being generous because the answer here really depends on how much effort people put in, how much contextualization. Are they offering me something of value as a next step or are they as we kind of kidded with LinkedIn spam just being like hello.

Anna

Yeah.

Randy

And that’s literally all you get.

Anna

Which can be funny.

Randy

It can be cute, but it’s tricky. I mean, we’re living in a world where it’s getting easier for sales people to email us and as a result we’re getting more and more. I mean there’s a lot of solutions out there, some great platforms, great partners of mine at Uberflip, companies like SalesLoft, Outreach, and HubSpot’s got functionality built in as well so that we can automate the cadence of these and they can tell now because they now have unsubscribes in them, but they’re written to be completely genuine from that rep.

Randy

I would say that with those, it’s not designed for you as a sales rep to just spam me, the way your marketing automation might do. It’s designed for you to be able to have a template to start with and personalize. So the key there to me is personalization and the tricky part is that I don’t think marketing is doing enough to help that sales rep personalize. I don’t know. What’s your thought?

Anna

Yeah. I think I kind of agree with you. I’m middle of the road on this one. Not to give a wishy-washy answer, but I think what I value are sales people who kind of give up the ghost and don’t keep coming after me when I either haven’t responded, like I literally have no clue what this company is, who they are, what they do, and it’s come to my personal email and it’s work-related. And I’m like, that’s weird, I don’t know how you got that. I don’t like that. I’m not going to answer that. Versus, those who are just sort of like, “Okay, well thanks for being honest. You’re not really ready to talk at this time. Call me when you’re ready.” I value that a lot.

Randy

You value that a lot.

Anna

I do.

Randy

It’s funny you say the personal email. I have some where, I guess, somehow I’m subscribed on both my personal and my work email. So I’ll get the same “personalized” (big air quotes here) email sent to my work and my home within four minutes of each other.

Anna

Yeah.

Randy

I sit there and I wonder, okay, was this a mass action, or did they actually send it twice to my two addresses? And I don’t know. We will just sit here.

Anna

We’ll never know because we’re out of time.

Randy

Absolutely. We are out of time. This has been the first rebranded Pardon the Marketing episode, and I think this was a fun one. We got to get a lot off our chests, really rant, rate quite a few different areas. I’d love to hear what our listeners feel about some of these areas. So if you were following along, again, use the hashtag #conex. Use the hashtag #pardonthemarketing. And when you do so, let us know which of our ten items … Just to run them down for you, because I was taking notes here, we have: the full-page takeover ads, the spam LinkedIn messages, the landing page, the Google Voice device in every bedroom, unskippable YouTube ads, commercials and trailers in movies, Instagram ads, generic CTAs, direct mail, and sales emails. And all of that in under 30 minutes. I feel good about that.

Anna

Yeah. It was good. It was fun. Misery loves company. I’m curious to hear what everybody else thinks.

Randy

While you’re at it, rate this podcast format out of ten when you use those hashtags so we can follow along. If you’re enjoying this or you’re enjoying our guests on a weekly basis, let us know which balance you like. Until next time, I’m Randy Frisch from Uberflip. Anna Hrach’s by my side from Convince & Convert, and this is the Conex Podcast.

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