2004jan17. Mail.
I am interested in buying into your pop-ad inventory. If you could get back to me with pricing and availability, I would appreciate it.
Currently, we are doing in-house promotionals for Alienware, a Go-L.com supercomputer, 42-inch plasma TV and some other items that would appeal to your audience.
I have an $8 – $10k budget to work with, and I’m looking for sites that can deliver high volume. If possible, please contact me by phone.
We currently have one pop-up slot open, enabling you to deliver pop-up ads to what our in-house demographics department describes as a “bored housewife in Idaho” and then there are a bunch of random fake numbers after that to make the demographic department look like it’s actually relevant to the company. She has no desire for any of things you name in your above email, but I think if we really stick with this campaign, pepper her web surfing with four or five pop-ups per hour, she may begin to see the wisdom of enjoying an episode of FOX TV’s “America’s Most Wanted: America Fights Back” in a ridiculously-oversized/overpriced format. I’ve spoken with Jerry in accounting, and he’s thinking we can soak your ass for five hunnerd clams per view, and an extra cool grand per click-through. I trust Jerry, he’s a good guy, but I think he’s a little off this time. So I’m giving you HALF OFF of Jerry’s little flip reasoning lapse. Throw an extra Franklin on the table and I'll give you the target market’s hometown and how many Wal-Marts are within ten miles of her. Act now and you'll get this dirty bowl in front of me that until very recently contained what I amusingly refer to as “my lunch.” It’s dishwasher safe and unlike most online advertisers actually reads the webpages it ends up at so when it sees a phrase on a website’s contact page that reads “Advertising of any kind is frowned upon. Big frowny face for you, ad-man. You make me bloat with queasiness. Do us all a favor and go away.” it knows that if it were an advertiser, its gap-jawed schtick is not welcome there. If you feel like replying, be reminded that my email program automatically substitutes any swear words with a parenthetical “[here the author wees on himself repeatedly]” ... cracks me up every time.
The advertiser was not cowed by this response, sending it around the office and “everyone is having a laugh.” My campaign of email terror has backfired. Resolution for 2004: MORE WRATHFULNESS
To wit: his username was first initial-last name and I was all like “I bet it’s Brad” and it turned out to be Brad and then I was like I KNEW his name was Brad, I should have guessed at it in the email – it’s ALWAYS Brad – IT HAS “AD” RIGHT IN THE FUGGIN PANTS OF THE NAME
In other news, the UPS man (“We’re brown! We’re emphasizing this for some reason! We’re putting our mighty marketing power behind the most putrid color in the rainbow!”) stopped by today and was schlepping a large package to me as I waited patiently on the porch. I wasn’t wearing shoes, and in Arizona, everything tries to kill you, including the ground (the trees drop caltrops-like mini-branches, the cactus spines end up there, holes hold bitey things, and of course there’s the wily maneuvers of the wisely-feared desert jellyfish). I think I mentioned this before. Anyway, he’s dragging this package over to me, and he reads the package upside down and mispronounces the name on the package and then makes a joke about how he shouldn’t try to read packages upside-down and of course right then instead of laughing I just thought of n package delivery drivers in the entire history of time making that joke m times throughout the course of their careers and I got this really far-away mxn look on my face and the UPS guy saw it and couldn’t wait to get out of there.