Vanity numbers and phone systems that make you spell first or last names should become extinct for businesses that expect people to dial from a cell phone. 

RIM (Blackberry) has a 41% market share of smart phones and the overall smart phone market is 15.2% of all cell-phone users.  Blackberry’s are great phones (I use one personally), however one thing Blackberries don’t do is show you the alpha keypad translation like a land-line phone.
Go ahead, try calling a company phone system and typing in the name Swatorski, Zlinksy, or even Jones on your first try from a Blackberry.  Call 422-Blue to reach the St. Louis Blues or 1888-GET CHARTER… you get it.  Now try it while driving – whoops, watch out. 

Vanity numbers promise improved sales and brand recognition because a consumer can commit to memory and dial later – that still makes sense for consumers.  However, if your target audience is comprised of business people than give it up.  Companies should be striving to make it easier to buy or service their customers, but, now they are upsetting 41% of business users with a bad brand touch, or worse, no touch at all (I still haven’t figured out how to dial charter!).

Technology has made sending consumers highly-personalized messages easier and less expensive than ever. Whether via web cookies and a nifty database, digital broadcast zones, or variable digital printing, the ability to deliver precise messages is easy enough for even the very-most-middle-manager to do it.

BUT, just because you can do something, does not mean you should do it (see: sex in junior high school).

Sending highly personalized messages without being able to deliver on a highly-personalized experience ruins whatever possible relationship I had with your brand.

For example:

You could be getting super-duper special personalized service right now!
Each month I get at least five solicitations from American Express (some quite elaborate), each one telling me how wonderful their card is, and what delightful and personalized services they offer.

Does AMEX not realize that I HAVE TWO OF THEIR CARDS IN MY WALLET?! Um… hey AMEX ol’ buddy – don’t you remember your pal Dave? I’ve been a member since…

“Welcome back, David!”
OK, but if you know who I am (and have even shipped things to me), PLEASE don’t ask me what country I live in. Really? If I HAVE to fill out another form…do you think there’s maybe there’s a better chance that I live in the USA instead of the United Arab Emirates or Uzbekistan.

Also, once you have my ZIP CODE, shouldn’t your super-duper computer be able to figure out the rest?..like what freaking city and country I’m in?

Do not promise what you cannot deliver. Now come on over here and rub my lamp, baby…

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Please stop using Internet Explorer 6.  It came out in 2004, is riddled with bugs and forces developers that want to use cool tools like MooTools write CSS and HTML hacks that make me cringe.

I understand you are fearful of change.  I get it.  Don't upgrade to Office 2007.  Doesn't bother me at all. Don't upgrade to Vista.  Heck that OS compelled me to switch to a Mac. I also understand that your IT support staff is not prepared for the onslaught of calls due to the ribbon replacing menus in Office 07. 

But the whole goal of Internet Explorer 7 was to be more secure (i.e. less for you to worry about).  Especially now that it's been out for 2 years.  Also, it's a browser, so it won't crash your network or cause a flood of calls to your IT support center.

In conclusion, this is my plea to you corporate America, to do what's best for web developers everywhere and upgrade to IE7 already.  The world of tab pages and standards based CSS support awaits you.

Sincerely,

Brian Schwartz

So today I’m listening to Pandora again and I see the ad below, confirming what I guessed at in a previous post – Pandora is geographically targeting ads to users.

This banner ad is specifically for an open house at the University on November 21. This Open House is in St. Louis.

The landing page is also well-done because it’s well designed and has the requisite social media sharing toolbar.  Although it should probably list the address of the open house on the landing page somewhere.

A few years ago I managed a similar campaign for another college in St. Louis, and although those campaigns were successful at driving traffic from direct mail, organic searches and pay-per-click advertising , it
would have been nice to use other tools like this.

Well done Fontbonne and well done Pandora.