Dear Clyde Smith, You Don’t Know Much About Experiential Marketing, Do You?

The whole reason I started posting here was a compulsion to opine on the new experiential marketing blog at Fast Company, by Clyde Smith.

One post in and I’m underwhelmed. Annnnnd, having been on the receiving end, I can say with pride that it’s the inalienable right of anyone who publishes on the Internet to be critiqued by total strangers. So, here goes:

1. Put the thesaurus down. Your 75-cent-word-itis makes the page blur. All that overblown vocab sounds like a dumb person trying to act intellectual.

2. You’re in marketing; please learn how to communicate quickly and clearly. You spent the first five paragraphs saying nothing at all, and in different meaningless ways. (Maybe your future is in politics?)

(God knows that my own blog posts will never be succinct — I’m usually in desperate need of an unapologetic editor with a fast red pen — but my blogging isn’t a gig with Fast Company, either. And blogging for fun isn’t the same as my work product.)

3. Find some stones, man, and assert your authority. What is all that blah-blah about how there are so many definitions, and other people’s definitions of experiential marketing don’t really match your definitions, hem haw hem haw…. while your own interpretation is nowhere to be found? Do you have an actual opinion?

You’ve got an FC byline, ferchrissake. Make a commitment. Quit waffling simply because you’re talking about a discipline that is really new and doesn’t have loads of documentation or an industry bible yet.

Tell us what experiential marketing is, and we’ll get in line behind you because you were authoritative. Instead, you just come off like you don’t have any idea what you’re supposed to be blogging about.

4. If you yourself can’t describe experiential marketing, at least show us by (well-thought, diverse) example. You offered one dull case, about toilet paper, with a link to demonstrate that, really, look, it’s all over the Internet. Yawn.

Heard of Operation Blueshock? The Guinness Storehouse? Billboards to go? Art of Shaving? JetBlue? Any of these or a dozen more that immediately jump to mind would have helped you illustrate that which seems to be eluding you.

5. Your linking is really clumsy. Who’s Lois Carter Fay? She’s not a national name, and her website is ugly. A skim shows that she doesn’t really know what experiential marketing means either. If you were going to quote someone saying nothing about nothing, you could have name-dropped with a little more savvy.

Your WordSpy link about the “roach bait”? Not actually an example of experiential marketing gone bad. And the site itself is some dude’s personal version of a Sniglet collection. And the quotation within was USA Today… from 2001.

Your “Charmin bathrooms in Times Square” reference? A YouTube link, with no analysis, no overview, nothing to give me the “elevator pitch” of the event.

I’m a professional that comes to Fast Company to read about other professionals, who ostensibly have something to teach me. Don’t waste my time by linking non-experts with non-opinions. If you can’t find a good link, don’t link at all.

6. Your blog protocol screams “amateur.” Stop responding to every comment: FC comes with a built-in audience and you don’t need to give warm fuzzies to every person with a jones to see their name in print.

Your deceptive product placement link was promising (the Jay-Z/Cristal thing is worth reading for those who want to learn about brand experience), but that was a self-link, you goober. It’s bad form to link your own company’s website and not even acknowledge it.

This isn’t MySpace. It’s time to start blogging like the grown-ups.

7. Experiential marketing is a business theory. It’s not a book, or a city, or a flavor of cracker or someone’s name. Stop capitalizing it.

_____________________________

I feel better now.

I feel kind of mean, too, but it boils down to this: I rely on FC for quality content, and so far you aren’t providing it, Clyde. I’d rather blame you and your first post, than think that they might be starting to slide.

And, experiential marketing is important to me, because more than any other marcom discipline right now, I rely on it to set my business apart from competitors. So I need valuable, meaty info that helps me do my job better. Instead, so far, I could write your blog better than you. You’re letting me down professionally.

Maybe next time I’m in a bad mood, I’ll fisk that girl from CIO.com who loves the sight of her own brilliance on the screen.