In honor of Friday the 13th, the Suite 4 team scoured the internet for some off-beat marketing decisions. Here are some of our favorite mishaps, confusing choices and surprising inspirations. Enjoy the weird marketing with us!
Audrey’s “Freaky Favorite” Tweet
Don’t make this mistake!
DiGiorno gives us a perfect example of a Twitter hashtag fail. Everyone, before you post something with a trending hashtag, make sure you know what it’s referencing! DiGiorno, of course, did not follow this advice and contributed to the #WhyIStayed hashtag conversation about why women stayed in abusive relationships and posted the rather appalling tweet: #WhyIStayed You had pizza. Yikes.
Miles’ “Freaky Favorite” App
Every forget where you parked? I know I have. I spent two hours in the Seattle Airport parking garage looking for my car. It was incredibly stressful and I don’t wish that experience on anyone! I wish I had an app that could tell me where I parked my car. Well, there are a few on the market, but Carrr-Matey does things a little differently. They’ll tell you where your car is, but they’ll do so in a pirate voice. No joke.
We’re not on the high seas on the way to Tortuga and the first mate doesn’t have scurvy. Just tell us where our car is.
Chase’s “Freaky Favorite” Inspiration
Coming up with a name for your business is a difficult thing to do. It needs to be descriptive, catchy and memorable. Plus, now that every business is online, it also needs to translate into a good domain name. We can take some inspiration from the following websites about what not to do with a domain name.
ihavegas.com – IHA Vegas Holiday Rentals
Although it may be funny to a kid in middle school, you probably don’t want to hand out your business cards with a web address that says “I have gas.” Avoid this by making sure your name doesn’t read as something else when all the letters are in lowercase and pushed together.
michaeljacksonsthisisitmoviemerchandise.com
Thankfully, this website is no longer active, and it’s probably because no one could type it into the address bar correctly. If your business has a long name, abbreviate it to be as short as possible while still making sense.
copio.us – Copious Marketing
It may seem clever to use a special domain to spell out the end of your business name, but usually it just confused the person reading it. You’ll also have a tougher time telling people what your domain is than if it were just copious.com
Devon’s “Freaky Favorite” Video
Every now and then you see something that works so well, your jaw drops, especially when you’re not expecting it. I know Weird Al Yankovic has been successfully making music for longer than I’ve been alive, but I’m still impressed by how well he understands both his brand and his audience. To market his latest album last year, Weird Al teamed up with different online organizations like Buzzfeed, Huffington Post and WSJ.com to debut different music videos.
This one was my favorite for so many reasons. As an editor and life-long grammar nerd, I, of course, love the subject (and the shout out to fellow ignorers of the Oxford comma). But I also love how he takes on the popular trend of lyric videos and makes it the entire video seem like an obvious choice we all wish we came up with ourselves.
As a little sidenote: with the right designer, animated videos can often be much cheaper and more exciting than a formal live video.