Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Kudos to the Clever

I walked into my office this morning to discover a large package sitting on my chair.  The box was from "Pinnacle Displays", which I vaguely remembered to be a company that sells some sort of trade show display stuff.  I get junk mail from companies like that on a regular basis, so I assumed this would be more of the same.  Still, this box was way too big and heavy to be regular junk mail.  Anyway, I was pre-coffee, so I set it on the floor of my office and decided to open it later.

By lunch I had tripped over this enormous box several times, each time remarking to myself that the sender had paid way too much for whatever swag was inside.

Late this afternoon I finally decided to open the box and see what the heck they had sent me. 

It was a bag of Evo dog food.

The accompanying letter from Pinnacle's Steve Peterson explained.  I'll spare you the details and just say this:  Steve wanted me to place a link to his website at the bottom of my article Going to a Trade Show.  The bag of food for Sophie was the attention-getter/bribe.

If you visit that article now, you will see that I have acceded to his request, but I struggled with the decision.  I've turned down lots of people asking to advertise on my blog.  How did Steve Peterson get the link he wanted by sending me a $30 bag of kibble?  I've refused cash offers worth hundreds of times more.

I guess I was just terribly impressed by how well Steve executed this stunt.  He perused my blog.  He saw my story about Absurd Customer Service, so he knew that I buy Evo.  Then he not only found a place to buy it (which probably wasn't easy), but he even got the right size bite for Sophie (a German Shepherd).

But that wasn't enough.  The whole gimmick would have backfired if his cover letter sounded smarmy, but the tone was perfect.  This kind of thing is just so very hard to do well, and Steve nailed it.

Bottom line:  I don't like it when people ask me for links or ad placements here, so I really wanted to be annoyed at this guy, but the feeling just wasn't there.  The simple truth is that he didn't tick me off.  Knowing how little patience I have for anybody trying to sell me something, I couldn't help but admire his accomplishment.

So, I offer a tip of my hat to Steve Peterson of Pinnacle Displays.

Note that Sophie had no concerns at all about this whole situation.  She doesn't care in the slightest about her credibility.  She'll do just about anything for food.  In fact, I know from experience that she will happily trade her dignity for half an ounce of store brand mozzarella.

So she was very quick to volunteer to wear the graphics of her new sponsor:

:-)