UPDATE to Son of a Pitch!

The day af­ter the ar­rival of Cardboard Dave, the flesh-and-blood one called me. He sheep­ishly asked me if I re­ceived his pack­age, then stated that he wasn’t ego­tis­ti­cal; the idea was his mar­ket­ing de­part­ments. (Um, you are the VP of Integrated Marketing, so I as­sume you have a say in their campaigns?)

In my most pleas­ant voice, I gave him feed­back on this, the most os­ten­ta­tious mar­ket­ing cam­paign I have ever wit­nessed. (See my orig­i­nal post for my thoughts.) While I un­der­stood the rea­son­ing be­hind it, and how tough it is to get into an or­ga­ni­za­tion to pitch your product/services for the first time, I told Dave a more per­sonal touch would have worked for me. It got me in a lot of doors in my pre­vi­ous job. He thanked me for my thoughts and promised to re­lay this to his mar­ket­ing department.

I could only promise Dave I would ask my Director if he’d be in­ter­ested in a meet­ing and the con­ver­sa­tion was closed.

I re­ceived this email five min­utes later:

From: ODA Info
Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 3:14 PM
To: Bonnie Dean
Subject:FW: From XX…

From: Dave
Sent: Friday, March 13, 2009 2:44 PM
To:ODA Info
Subject: From XX…

Hi there–

If you could please for­ward to Bonnie Dean, that would be most appreciated!

Best,

Dave

Hi Bonnie–

Thanks for the con­ver­sa­tion on the phone ear­lier to­day. Hope you don’t mind me send­ing through the info@ email ad­dress… [Um, yes, I do.]

It was great to get some con­struc­tive feed­back from you on our sales ap­proach, and I would com­pletely agree that a cus­tomized mes­sage is 100% more ben­e­fi­cial (and ef­fec­tive). I’m sorry Big Dave turned out to be cum­ber­some for you…we can come and re­move him from your of­fice if you wish…

I did have a deeper look on the site and what bet­ter way to ad­dress your #1 core goal which is “to pro­mote op­ti­mal oral health” than to turn the as­so­ci­a­tion in­side out from a con­sumer per­spec­tive, brand your url www​.youro​ral​health​.ca, and serve up rel­e­vant, in­ter­est­ing den­tal ed­u­ca­tion con­tent that is com­pletely user-friendly and very cur­rent. I’ll go out on a limb and sug­gest this is more pro­gres­sive than some of the as­so­ci­a­tions we’ve worked with in the past…

I ap­pre­ci­ate you tak­ing the time to talk with me…if there’s a chance to meet, that’s great and if not…all the best and here’s to den­tal hygiene!

Have a great weekend.

Dave

I promptly de­clined his of­fer of a meet­ing. Here’s why:

• If he dug into our web­site and opened one of our news re­leases, my email ad­dress is at the bot­tom of every re­lease. Why not take the time to search it out?
• His ideas for our web­site? We did that a year ago with a com­plete over­haul of the site to ap­peal to the pub­lic. We think it’s pretty rad. Is he say­ing our con­tent isn’t rel­e­vant, in­ter­est­ing or user-friendly? (Take a look and you be the judge.) Isn’t it a tad coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to crit­i­cize the web­site of the com­pany you wish to work with? Instead of in­sin­u­at­ing that it could be im­proved, per­haps of­fer sug­ges­tions on how to add to its great­ness. Flattery does get you places.

I still have Cardboard Dave loom­ing be­hind me, and the search is on for a life-size pic­ture of Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s face to su­per­im­pose on his mug. The only good things to come out of this was a few blog posts and hope­fully, a life-sized, card­board cut-out of the Comedian watch­ing my back.