The Big Fat Marketing Blog

Still getting caught up with your reading? Make sure you’ve read the most popular Big Fat Marketing Blog posts from September:

1) Is J.C. Penney Nuts? Multichannel Merchant editor Melissa Dowling chides the department-store retailer for abandoning print catalogs in favor of “look books”; commenters chime in.

2) Three Emulation-Worthy Blogs from B-to-B Merchants Editor at large Sherry Chiger singles out blogs from WEBstaurant Store, Store Supply Warehouse, and New Pig.

3) For Sale: Female Students’ Backsides How to promote a bunless sandwich? As Promo executive editor Patty Odell reveals, KFC opted to post ads on the tushes of female college students.

4) Dropping an “L” Can Be Quite Embarrassing Whoops! Patty Odell shows what happens when an Indiana public-school system neglects to copyedit a billboard.

5) “I’d Like 3 Ads, 7 TV Spots, 2 Emails, Some Direct Mail and a Website” Grant Johnson, founder/CEO of Johnson Direct, finds fault with how some companies conduct the search for a marketing agency.

I’ve moaned in the past about the creepiness about online behavioral advertising. It seems if I am doing some sort of MCM Awards research, and go to a merchant’s Website, its banner ad will follow me wherever I go until I remove the cookie. Even funnier, when I’m in our Connecticut office and hooked up to our server in Kansas, the Kansas City Royals want me to buy tickets. I’m not going to travel 1,000 miles to watch a ballgame, even though I’m a ballpark aficionado, unless I’m heading to our home office and someone’s taking me out for some serious BBQ before and afterward.

Last July, the DMA and a few other agencies issued the Self-Regulatory Program for Online Behavioral Advertising, and they started marketing it heavily this month. The bottom line is the groups involved want to relieve some of the consumer paranoia that surrounds the potential creep-out factor involved. They want the consumer to know marketers aren’t stealing personal data out of their computers, and they want to remind marketers that they can place a cookie on a consumers’ computer, but better not be doing anything shady. more

I want to give Jackson & Perkins a break. Really, I do.

After all, I know the floral gifts mailer has had a tumultuous time in the past few years, what with Harry and David selling it off in 2008, and then the new owners filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy earlier this year, and then finally being sold to private equity firm Blackstreet Capital two months ago. more

We’re coming up on the holiday season, which means email inboxes will get even more cluttered than usual. So it seems as good a time as any to look at a few recent subject lines that stood out among the scores of competing messages surrounding them.

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The upstart Affordable Mail Alliance, which played a role in the Postal Regulatory Commission’s Sept. 30 rejection of the U.S. Postal Service’s request for an exigent rate case, isn’t resting on its laurels. more

Miss any of our DMA:2010 coverage? Here’s a recap with links to all our stories (along with a few random observations):

1. Keynotes by new DMA CEO Larry Kimmel and rock star Bret Michaels kicked off the main conference on Monday. Kimmel got high marks all around for hitting the right notes in his opening address, and many attendees were pleasantly surprised by Michael’s marketing acumen. (I couldn’t track down a bottle of his Snapple Diet Trop-A-Rocka to try during the show? Could you?)

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