The Big Fat Marketing Blog

In my November editor’s note, The power of interruption, I advise catalogers to start mailing again to grow via prospecting and reactivating lapsed customers.

Little did I know I when I wrote the column, I was about to be reactivated by a catalog mailing myself. Here’s how it happened. more

Every now and then we write about a promotion or a deal that gauges our interest. And sometimes we want to just go Elf ourselves… This one is both.

I’m awaiting a follow-up call with Bob Thacker, the senior vice president of marketing and advertising for OfficeMax, about ElfYourself 4.0. The 4.0 we’re just throwing in because, really, it’s the fourth year Office Max is allowing users to turn themselves into elves for the sole purpose of entertaining yourselves (and your friends). more

Home Depot’s vice president of specialty channels, Michael Cooper, had a light-hearted moment a few months ago at e-Tail in Baltimore.

In talking about the challenges the home improvement retailer had experienced trying to become a multichannel retailer, Cooper said this about Home Depot’s infrastructure:

“We’re going to come into the ‘90s, allow [online] returns in the stores, and allow store gift cards to be used as tender online,” Cooper said lightheartedly before he explained why the project is going to take some time.

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So did you hear that there’s going to be a Free Shipping Day on Dec. 17, and all merchants are invited to participate? I heard about it, because I read it in The Briefing Room.

OK, that was kind of a cheesy plug for the new service of Multichannel Merchant. But I needed a cool way to tell everyone that The Briefing Room has launched, and why you need to visit it each and every single day. more

OK, so it wasn’t much of a surprise last week when a federal judge dismissed porn trade group the Free Speech Coalition’s lawsuit against Utah’s comically misnamed child-protection do-not-e-mail registry.

What was disconcerting, though, was a vow Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff made in the press release touting his victory.

Read the rest here.

I wrote this piece yesterday for Multichannel Merchant about updated Federal Trade Commission guidelines that will force bloggers who receive swag or cash in exchange of a blog post to disclose their relationship with product or service.

And after I heard Emilio Amodei, founder of BlogVertise, discuss how his company can get your product blogged about by hundreds of bloggers, I had a red flag go up.

I can see someone with a product or a service wanting to get exposed by bloggers back in 2005 or before. But now we’re in an era of product ratings and recommendations. And consumers are savvy enough to go to, say, Amazon.com and see what people who have used a certain product has to say about it, rather than trusting Joe Blogger who may just say nice things for the payout.

It’s all a matter of trust, and I think Joe Consumer is going to trust sites with ratings and recommendations before a blogger.

What do you think? Is the blogosphere a reputable enough place yet? Or for that matter, are readers smart enough to see a product pitch as a product pitch?