Claire Macdonald, publisher of Strategy Magazine, I am sad to say that you have become a pain in the butt.
Twice in the past week, you have spammed my office voicemail with a lame-o recorded message inviting me to your Understanding Youth conference. Now I may not understand youth, but I most definitely understand when I am being disturbed, and that is when I have to listen to your messages.
Now I love your magazine; I have been a subscriber for years (starting way, way back when it was a tabloid on newsprint) and have cited its content countless times amongst colleagues at Airborne and here at Pow!
What's more, I have actually attended (spoke at, even!) your conferences...which I suppose is why I am now being besieged by an electronic you who chooses to call me only after hours, and does so with cheesy, canned "enormous discount" and "you only have until Friday!" offers. What, no Viagra or stock tips?
Claire, as Publisher of a progressive Marketing magazine, you should know better. This stuff sucks, and does you a disservice. (If you MUST do something like this, at least acknowledge the awkwardness of it; tell me that instead of recording your debut CD of cover tunes, you decided to use the studio time to record a conference pitch instead. Or that you're calling people on Canada's "No Call List" asking them to re-consider.)
I understand the economics, my dear Claire; I'm in the biz of selling stuff, too. It ain't easy reaching out and pitching to a big, lucrative database in an unobtrusive manner (in fact, we in the mobile space are busy grappling with that conundrum on a daily basis). But surely there must be a more appropriate way to deal with Strategy's sharp-as-a-tack, marketing-savvy audience than these unreasonable facsimiles of a phone call...
Uh, next time...why not ask the people you write about for a bit of help?
