“Great news Bell Fib TV is now available in your building.” [spelling error intentional]

You know what, Bell? That’s just freakin’ amazing! You now have the ability to target your marketing right down to the building! Let’s ignore the fact that the least competent direct marketers in the country have been able to do that for a few decades and just stick to celebrating your new-found skills, shall we?

So, here’s something for your databases: our condo fees include cable service with no opt out. Let’s take a moment to let that settle in, because I just know I’m going to have to explain it to you.

You guys drop a lot of money marketing to this complex. Multiple paper mailings a year, and now targeted e-mail (don’t tell me how much you spend on targeted e-mail, I’ll probably just get angrier). The odds that someone who lives here is going to be stupid enough to subscribe to a redundant cable service are, unsurprisingly, about the same as the odds they work in marketing for Bell. Which is to say not high.

If you ever find someone who has more than two brain cells to rub together, you might consider doing an ROI analysis by postal code. You’ve direct mailed, you’ve called, you’ve e-mailed, you’ve sent pathetic but hopeful commission based agents. I know it hasn’t paid off. It never will. We’re a black hole of marketing spend. The sooner you stop, the more quickly your negative ROI will level off.

So go for it. It’s a simple analysis:

  1. Get a list of all building postal codes.
  2. Use demographic information to discover if the uptake on your TV products is two or more standard deviations below mean.
  3. Blacklist the postal codes that perform that badly.

See, it’s simple. So simple even Bell can manage it. Really.

Now you might wonder why I’m all fired up about this.

Here’s the thing. You just spent a whole mess of effort misrepresenting the facts up at the CRTC, trying to lobby for Usage-Based Billing. Infrastructure is too expensive, you whined. Demand is too high. Whine. A large number of people had to get pretty angry in order to beat back the bullshit and prevent a move that was really an attempt to drive your wholesalers out of business. So here’s my idea. Why don’t you take some of the millions of dollars you waste on moronic marketing and spend it on your network instead? I realize it’s still not in your corporate DNA, but try competing for once, instead of just throwing advertising dollars around hoping something will stick. It’s pathetic.

Mastodon