[Gllug] [OT] Website disclaimers

[John Winters]

Jason Clifford wrote:
> On Sun, 17 Dec 2006, Peter Cannon wrote:
> 
>> How cool is that? I hate those "Visit our lovely town" sites but some 'slick 
>> kid' managed to slip that one past the red tape.
> 
> I wonder how effective it has been as a means of actually getting more 
> people to visit the area.
> 
> Does anyone know if there have been studies on how effective this type of 
> marketing is - ie get people to view something because it is very wierd 
> and actually have the advert part be effective in the traditional sense.

I'm amused by the similar technique of feeding a story to the press and 
having them fall for it hook, line and sinker and print it as a news 
item.  An often used one is the, "Product XXXXXX - the must have item 
for Christmas - is going to be in horribly short supply.", but I 
particularly admired the new one which Threshers came up with recently. 
  They "accidentally" released an e-voucher onto the 'net which you 
could print out and use to get a 40% discount on all products in their 
off-licences.  The press dutifully printed lots of stories about how 
Threshers stores were being overwhelmed with customers but that 
Threshers had manfully undertaken to honour the vouchers.

It sounded too good to be true, until you remember that the prices in 
Threshers off-licences are all inflated by 50% in the first place, in 
order to fund their perpetual "3 for the price of 2" offer.  Buying a 
single bottle from Threshers is ludicrously expensive; even with the 3 
for 2 offer they're only just competitive.  Since you couldn't have both 
offers at the same time, the apparent "40% off" voucher really gave you 
only a 7% discount.  Nonetheless, the press all fell for it and gave 
Threshers lots of free advertising.

It seems there's a maximum IQ threshold for those wanting to be journalists.

John
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