Web Directions

One step closer to the death of telemarketing

• In: Blog
• By:Maxine
• April 30, 2008
• Leave a response

I like this as I do feel it is one step closer to one of the three things that I con­sider to be the worst three (mar­ket­ing) scourges on the planet: tele­mar­ket­ing. We all pay (hand­somely, thank you Telstra) for the priv­i­lege of hav­ing a land­line. I do not have this land­line for the pur­pose of being con­tacted, in my pri­vate time, by peo­ple try­ing to sell me things I do not want. If the tele­phone was a free ser­vice, which I paid for by accept­ing adver­tis­ing, a la net­work tele­vi­sion, it would be a dif­fer­ent story. But it is not, and this is why I see tele­mar­ket­ing as an evil inva­sion of my home.

Enter the crowd sourced death of the tele­mar­keter. Over at ReadWriteWeb I read today about a great idea called Callercomplaints​.com, where you can reg­is­ter the num­ber, and as many other details as you can get, of any tele­mar­keter that calls you. The hope is that the entries for organ­i­sa­tions that find them­selves on this list will find their way towards the top of Google searches for that organ­i­sa­tion. Appealingly cun­ning. The only down­side that I can see is that in my expe­ri­ence here in Australia at least, you don’t get to see the num­ber as it is blocked.

I do have faith in the broader idea behind this project though. My only hope is that some­one clever will use it to come up with a plan to wipe out the other two worst (mar­ket­ing) scourges:

• Advertising in the cin­ema: yes, I paid $16 to see 20 min­utes of lame advertising…
• Those guys who drive around on motor scoot­ers with the lit­tle trailer or in those spe­cial trucks, the sole pur­pose of which is to trail about adver­tis­ing for some sickly drink or what­ever: seri­ously, I can­not believe that is not against the law in 2008. We really do care about the envi­ron­ment. A lot.

OK, rant­ing over for now.

One response to “One step closer to the death of telemarketing”:

1. • By:Cheryl Lead
   • April 30th, 2008
   

   Well there’s always this method.

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