Why’s Mr Grumpy Grumpy?
The mighty Phil Cohen cheered me up somewhat this morning with his ‘Thoughts and accolades‘ (well worth a look) but on the whole Monday, despite a great long weekend in Munich (meetings Friday, eating, drinking, lots of shopping and a friend’s 50th birthday party Saturday night where I caught up with a lot of Intel alumni I hadn’t seen in 15 – 20 years) the start of the week has been one of frustration† and expense …
- For some strange reason (which we haven’t fathomed out yet) our servers decided to send out at least THREE copies of our ‘DailyDOOH 14 November 2011‘ email at 13:00 GMT today (many apologies to everyone for that. We are currently investigating why it happened).
- Yet another (supposed) ‘intern’ emailing in (over the weekend) and asking for help with market research. When we reply and say “sure, always willing to help students but who’s the research for?” we get a blank, no reply, nothing. This is not the first time this has happened.
- We finally persuaded our last WinDoze diehards to switch to Apple but that cost us as we just put in a 15.4″ TFT Apple MacBook Pro Core i7 2.4 GHz bulk order.
- Despite our (server software) issue earlier we don’t take any of our infrastructure for granted and are continually improving, what we think, is a pretty good couple of racks’ worth of equipment. A new order today totalled well over GBP 3K for routers, firewalls and some memory upgrades etc for our servers. It also included a WatchGuard XTM 5 Series 505 – security appliance.
- Lastly, I don’t take kindly to emails (almost ALWAYS from PR agencies) that start with “I was wondering if it would be possible if you could provide me with the MPU or AVE and the circulation for the DailyDOOH as I am researching advertising rates for a potential client.” and again when we ask the simple question of “who’s it for?” we get in response “I am at the very early stages of collating a list for the client, so unfortunately I wouldn’t be able to give you this information at this stage.”
In terms of (2) and (5) it’s a real shame that folks have to be so deceitful and dishonest. We’ve long known that the majority of so called ‘research’ in our industry is simply made up by ‘interns’ ringing round and getting numbers and opinion from anyone they can blag 5 minutes on the phone with and we don’t have enough fingers and toes to count the number of PR agencies who have asked for ‘price lists’ for errr clients.
†As the Judge said to Caspar Schlitz “I hereby sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you cheer up” … earlier in the Monty Python sketch; Prosecutor to Caspa Schlitz “I put it to you that you were, on February 5th this year, very depressed with malice aforethought, and did moan quietly, contrary to the Cheerful Noises Act.”
Categories: Housekeeping
I’m in the process of building up some business that will make me lots of money, can I have details of all your subscribers so that I can ask them for their money and of course I will say that ‘DailyDOOH sent us’! 🙂
Don’t worry Adrian, you’re not alone, the amount of emails I get a week asking if we would like to increase our market share via our website always amazes me….of course never any mention that it’s going to cost me anything.
As I say to every new and existing partner that I deal with, it’s my goal to do everything I can to bring as much trust and thoughtful ownership into this industry that I possibly can….far too many have gone before me with the opposite attitude that sometimes makes the DOOH arena a fairly unpleasant place to be. 🙁
Ho Hum, it could be worse, we could be politicians!
by Tom Milner on Nov 14, 2011 at 14:03 @627
Let’s be brutal-to-frank here, there is NO intention of the PR agency suggesting to a client that they will advertise. All the PR agency wants to know is your ‘reach’ for if and when they ‘place’ stories with you.
by Max Clifford on Nov 14, 2011 at 14:12 @633
Sounds like at our office in Germany – when someone calls on the extention -0 number I know it is someone wanting to sell me something… All clients and even all prospective clients have my extention (Durchwahl) from my business card and call me directly
by Hakan on Nov 14, 2011 at 14:28 @645
Great News Adrian about the FINAL conversion to Mac platform – slowly people (including your windoze stalwarts) are beginning to understand the benefits of the Mac!!! Oh yes and thanks for the 3 lots of DailyDOOH goodness this lunchtime…!
by Alex Hughes on Nov 14, 2011 at 15:46 @699
Alex, Alex…. “MAC” is good to run windows with style… hehe (proud owner of a macbookpro with win7+iphone+ipad+ipod…)
🙂
by Luis R. Villafane on Nov 15, 2011 at 09:01 @417