Jason Catlett might disagree, but to me the worst privacy violations are being perpetrated by general advertisers, not direct marketers.
DMers aren’t forcing moviegoers to sit through 10 or 20 minutes of commercials before the feature starts.
They aren’t painting subway trains over with ads so you can’t even see out the window.
And they aren’t desecrating public landmarks with repulsive ads.
Case in point: The Flatiron Building is one of the most familiar sights in New York. Designed by architect Daniel H. Burnham, the slender 22-story building was built in 1902 on the triangular space bordered by Fifth Avenue, Broadway and 23rd Street. It was New York’s first skyscraper.
To pass it even now is to be transported back to the Teddy Roosevelt era, or to a time when the city was “still filled with a river light, when you heard the Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat,” in the words of John Cheever.
But New Yorkers who went by it on a recent morning saw something that was just a little less consoling. The corner of the triangle was covered with construction netting, and the netting was covered with a building-high ad for H&M, a popular-priced clothing store. The woman in the ad could be seen from 20 blocks away.
Apparently many New Yorkers felt the way I did, and it was pulled down after an outcry. But how did they think they could get away with that on a landmark?
And that’s only the latest in a long history of outrages. It was our friends on the general brand side who cluttered the nation’s highways with billboards, and who in an earlier time surrounded railroad tracks with them.
And despite all their high-tech gadgetry, don’t think DMers have a monopoly on intrusive technology. Recently some outfit announced that it wants to put TV monitors at eye level over men’s-room urinals.
You can opt out of e-mail and telemarketing, but you won’t be able to opt out of that disruption of one of your most private moments. (By the way, watch out for your shoes.)
Presumably marketers don’t pull these kinds of stunts unless they think they’ll pay out. But do they? My guess is that if they do, it’s only in the sense that a client has once again been hoodwinked by an agency into wasting big money. The alleged increase in brand awareness can never be worth the annoyance.
So take heart, direct marketers. You at least know if your occasional lapses into bad taste are working.
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