Dopey Digital Diva Dumbness

Today's sermon is about a story in Ad Age called "Wired Women an Untapped Goldmine for Package Goods." The thrust of the story is that package-goods marketers are missing out on a huge bonanza by not spending money to reach "digital divas" on line.

Apparently MicroSoft, MindShare and Ogilvy teamed up to convince gullible package-goods clients to piss away money on social marketing and other online ad nonsense. Here are some gems from the story, along with comments from yours truly.

Long ago...package-goods marketers largely concluded that women didn't want to spend much time talking about their low-involvement products or buying them online...How wrong they were....some 16% of U.S. women... actually do.

Which means 84% don't.

And what exactly are the 16% doing? "Talking about" or "buying" or what? And just for the heck of it, why not tell us how often the 16% do whatever they're doing. Once a week? Once a year? Twice in a lifetime?

"There are women we found who actually have standing orders with Amazon for their toilet paper," said Beth Uyenco, global research director at Microsoft.

Hey, global research director, there are people who wipe their ass with Rice Krispie Treats. What the hell does that have to do with spending marketing dollars intelligently?

"The researchers found that women speak or write 7,000 words daily compared with 2,000 for men...That extra 5,000 words a day can be spent on the digital space talking themselves into loving your brand"

Sure, and they like music so they can do interpretive dances about your brand.

Just a reminder to those who don't keep up with TAC -- and those who can't distinguish between research and bullshit -- here's the real truth about advertising to women on line, from a Global Advertising Study done by AOL:

"Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often.

Who are these "heavy clickers"? They are predominantly female, indexing at a rate almost double the male population. They are older. They are predominantly Midwesterners...they look at sweepstakes far more than any other kind of content..."

In other words, as brilliant commenter Timothy Coote wrote recently, these fabulous digital divas that represent an untapped goldmine are "the people who think they really are the one-millionth customer."



Full Feed Vs Short Feed
Several readers have asked me to publish the full RSS feed of this blog instead of the short version. I tried it for one day and I don't like it. Here's why. I'm a little obsessive. I'll often change a word or phrase during the course of a day. Some days I'll do it a lot. I don't know how RSS works, but I notice that the changes don't appear very quickly, if at all, on the full feed. They appear instantaneously on the blog.

So click one more time and come to the real blog. The exercise will do you good..