Hey! You Got Your Digital Promo in my TV!

Top Chef is one of my favorite TV shows. It’s certainly the best reality show on any channel these days. While watching the latest episode, I caught a whiff of some digital promotion in the kitchen.

Across the screen flashed a number to text message so I could vote in a poll during the show. Later, another ad asked me to join the mobile fan club by text message. The real kicker was when a full blown commerical came on asking me to text message Bravo so I could download the Top Chef game to my phone (after paying $6.99 of course).

Text message voting and mobile updates are not unheard of, but before the first half hour of the show was through, I had been bombarded by every possible angle of mobile digital promotion. Later in the show, Bravo would plug its website, especially the blogs and video features.

Of course all this promotion led me to check out their web site, which was promoting the show and telling me to go watch it. So I went back to the TV, which in tune was telling me to go back to the computer. I was so confused I didn’t know what to do.

This situation led me to ask: When cross promoting, is it more effective to promote from a traditional medium to the web or from the web to the traditional medium?

Google is Stalking Me

I’ll start this blog off with one of the weirdest forms of digital promotion.  It’s certainly the one that make me feel the most uncomfortable.

Gmail is Google’s mail client and is a pretty slick piece of software at that, but I can’t help but feel like somebody at Google has been going through my email every time I log on.  Why?  Because Google’s Adsense displays adds that correspond with keywords in the email.

An example.  I had written an email to a tattoo artist and he wrote me back.  I used the word tattoo a few times in the email.  When I read his reply, text ads along the sidebar were displaying ads for online tattoo sites and tattoo parlors.

Creepy, yes?  Wait, you say, of course you got ads because you sent it to a business email, right?  No, Google does this with every email.  I could send my mom an email about taking out the trash and I bet a Waste Management ad would pop up.

I think this is a case of digital promotion going too far.  Google doesn’t need to analyze my email for keywords.  They should just throw up random ads.  I don’t care if they make less money.  My privacy is more important.