Another October, another DMA annual conference. Ah, the glamour and excitement of it all.
How was your experience at annual this year? Here's a few of the tidbits gleaned in and around the conference hall.
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For the second year in a row, top honors at the Echo Awards — the Diamond Echo — went to the Spanish agency Comunicacion Proximity. I had the chance to talk to Pablo Alzugaray, president of Madrid-based CP the next morning.
“It was a magic moment,” he said, joking that the suitable follow-up might be retirement so the agency could go out on top.
CP won the Diamond for its “Amnisty for Safiya” campaign for Amnistia Internacional. The online/offline campaign — which also won a Gold Echo in the nonprofit category — was created to save the life of Safiya Husseini, a Nigerian woman who was to be executed in a brutal manner. With only 15 days to collect signatures, CP Interactive combined a viral e-mail campaign with a direct mail piece. The effort resulted in more than 600,000 signatures obtained online, 60,000 by mail or fax, and 40,000 calls to the Safiya call center, leading to a reprieve of Husseini's execution.
While it was a thrill to win in 2001 for the Sony España campaign “It's a Crime,” this year was more fulfilling, said Alzugaray. “When you're doing something to save a life, there's no comparison.”
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The Echoes were hosted by “Saturday Night Live” alum Kevin Nealon this year. Nealon is best known for hosting SNL's “Weekend Update,” for being half of “Hans & Franz,” and our personal favorite, his “Subliminal Man” routine, where he poked fun at subliminal advertising. Your ad here. I had hoped to talk with Nealon prior to the show to get his take on the wacky world of DM, but alas, his schedule didn't allow time for an interview. Too busy to talk to lowlife business reporters. Ah, well. We heard from those who attended the ceremony that he was quite funny all the same, and that it was a grand time. After all, winning isn't important — it's just an honor to be nominated. Losing stinks. Where's the bar?
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Look, up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! No, it's…customer relationship manglement!
The travel experience of two attendees from a Massachusetts company to the conference was a perfect example of how not to treat your customers if you want to engender any kind of loyalty.
The women, who asked not to be identified, left Boston's Logan Airport on the Saturday 8:45 a.m. United Airlines flight. Two minutes into the trip, a flock of birds flew into the plane. The passengers naturally got alarmed as the plane shook, its wing flaps fluttered oddly and a fireball shot out as an engine was damaged.
Thankfully, the plane was able to land safely back at Logan with no injuries to any of the passengers. United's reps on the ground did their best to get everyone rescheduled to other flights, either later that day — or, as our travelers understandably requested — the next morning.
This would have been all well and good — if the airline then hadn't promptly lost one of the ladies' checked bags. She wanted to retrieve it before leaving the airport on Saturday, but was told it had already been sent ahead on the next flight. Upon arrival in San Francisco the next morning, the bag was nowhere to be found.
The baggage claim customer service rep did everything possible not to be helpful. First, she refused to call Boston to check on the bag, explaining she wasn't allowed to call out of state. She wouldn't give our traveler the phone number so she could call herself, nor would she use the traveler's cell phone to make the call. Finally, a supervisor did call Boston, and cheerfully reported that the bag had never left Logan.
Our friend finally got her bag on Monday morning.
What, you might ask, did United do to compensate her? A free flight? An allowance to buy the necessities she needed to get through a night without her luggage? Nope. The airline didn't even offer her a bag of stale peanuts.
“I feared for my life on Saturday morning,” she said. “The least they could have done is pretend to care.”
Here's hoping your trip home was uneventful.
BETH NEGUS VIVEIROS (bethdirect@aol.com) is executive editor of DIRECT.
