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Dear NESTEA®

Thank you for your email inviting me to your marketing event. Actually, to be fair, it wasn’t from you. The emails were from MS&L Worldwide, the company handling marketing for your marketing event.

And thank you for your second email three days later from another person at the same marketing company inviting me again to the same marketing event.

I guess that’s what you mean by “aggressively represent the interests of our clients”. Maybe that’s what won you your Silver Anvil Award. How else can you deliver “measurable business results for many of the world’s largest companies and most successful brands, including … General Motors“? Your 70-year-old company whose history seems to be nothing but corporate merger after corporate merger, is clearly in the best position to do this kind of marketing. Especially when you’re doing marketing of a Canadian event from your office in Ann Arbor, Mich., instead of Toronto (or, say, Montreal).

Such a big firm, I feel a bit silly doing this. But can I offer a few suggestions for future marketing campaigns?

• Both emails begin with “Hi Steve”. Why are we on a first-name basis? We’ve never met. Is it because you don’t take bloggers seriously? Is it because you so desperately need to sound like you’re part of our demographic that formalities have been deemed undesirable?
• You constantly refer to the brand name NESTEA® in capital letters and with that R symbol (except for that one time you accidentally used the French “MD”). Are you afraid I’m going to steal your brand or something? Or worse, decapitalize it?
• You’re offering me an all-expenses-paid junket to Mont Tremblant to see your marketing event in exchange for talking about it “on my blog, Facebook and Twitter”. Does this count? Is there something on my blog that gave you the impression that I can be bought like that? (Did you even read my blog before sending these emails?)
• You’ve invited “pro athletes” (actually Olympic snowboarders, does that qualify as “professional athlete”?) and Sam Roberts to your event. I think the Virgin Festival at Jean Drapeau Park has you beat on the guest list. They’ve got New Kids on the Block and Jonathan Roy!
• You’ve linked to your Twitter account, which has only a single update pointing to your press release. It’s a wonder you only have six followers. Your corporate hash tag also doesn’t inspire yet.
• You use the word “awesome.” You seem to be very attached to this word, judging from your forgettable Flash-based product placement video game. What 50-year-old middle manager decided that using “awesome” and “ultimate” would appeal to us?
• Both your emails conclude with the standard corporate disclaimer boilerplate text, suggesting that I can’t divulge its contents if I’m not the intended recipient. Should I email back to confirm that I’m the intended recipient? Maybe it was meant for some other Steve?
• You link to your Facebook page. Actually, you don’t. You link to it from your Twitter account and tell me to search for it in your email instead of just including a link. I took a peek, and noticed that there are lots of questions from the public on that page (click on “Just Fans” on the Wall), and none of them have answers. Your Facebook event page also leaves lots of questions unanswered (though you do repeat many times that it’s free).
• Your event doesn’t have a website. Or at least none that I could find.

I had contemplated taking you up on your invitation of free food (I’m not crazy about skiing or snowboarding) and discovering just how such giant marketing events work, how spending so much money could “impact behavioral changes” enough to justify the expense. Unfortunately, I’m working on Saturday so I can’t make it.

Besides, this is more fun. And I can keep my dignity. And I don’t really care for iced tea.

Sincerely,

“Steve”

p.s. Building a snow hill in summer? That’s crazy. I should blog about that.

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