Comedian of the week … He-e-e-e-r-e’s Patrick!

Email marketers, doncha love ’em?

Step forward, Patrick McGlone of cvent.com who sent me the following quite astonishing message, headed (unbelievably):

Lunch Seminar – Best Practices for Event Management, Web Surveys and Email Marketing

This strikingly imaginative heading was followed by Complimentary lunch seminar and then a rather curt greeting:

Charles, (Er, who?)

I hope all is well at Drayton Bird Associates Ltd. Cvent has enjoyed having you as our customer and we look forward to continuing to work together in the future. We are very excited for the upcoming year, as we will be releasing several new products and services.

As a valued customer, we’d like to invite you to a complimentary Cvent luncheon and product seminar in Greater London. While this is primarily a sales presentation, hundreds of our existing customers have attended and told us that these product seminars have helped them to discover new product features and enhance their use of the Cvent system.

So this is best practice?

Apart from the way they are so excited about what’s happening to them – a sort of corporate masturbation, because who gives a shit …

… I have never heard of Cvent. If I have ever done business with them, I can’t recall it. And they certainly don’t know me, because my name is Drayton. In fact just to help out cretins we call our firm Drayton Bird Associates.

This all prompted me to wonder what worst practice might be. Could it be starting messages with something more creative, like “Hello, Fuckwit”?

Anyhow, this majestically useless piece of incompetent drivel (which they sent me not once but three times) ends with the following dangerous suggestion: Also, please do not forget about Cvent’s Referral Program! If you refer a colleague or associate to us and they become a Cvent client within 6 months, we will extend to you a £125 reward of your choice.

No doubt this inspired approach to the concept of best practice gets plenty of mugs to come along, but to me it looks like spam, and I am trying to think of three marketers I really hate …

For instance there is a man called Paul Liesching who ripped us off big time a couple of years ago with a thing called Teddiphone … but he’s too smart to fall for this, I’m afraid. He was certainly too smart to pay us what he agreed.

About the Author

In 2003, the Chartered Institute of Marketing named Drayton one of 50 living individuals who have shaped today’s marketing.

He has worked in 55 countries with many of the world’s greatest brands. These include American Express, Audi, Bentley, British Airways, Cisco, Columbia Business School, Deutsche Post, Ford, IBM, McKinsey, Mercedes, Microsoft, Nestle, Philips, Procter & Gamble, Toyota, Unilever, Visa and Volkswagen.

Drayton has helped sell everything from Airbus planes to Peppa Pig. His book, Commonsense Direct and Digital Marketing, out in 17 languages, has been the UK’s best seller on the subject every year since 1982. He has also run his own businesses in the U.K., Portugal and Malaysia.

He was a main board member of the Ogilvy Group, a founding member of the Superbrands Organisation, one of the first eight Honorary Fellows of the Institute of Direct Marketing and one of the first three people named to the Hall of Fame of the Direct Marketing Association of India. He has also been given Lifetime Achievement Awards by the Caples Organisation in New York and Early To Rise in Florida.

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