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A few months ago my wife signed up with an online marketing program called BzzAgent. BzzAgent is a “viral” marketing company. The idea here is they send free samples to a bunch of members and those members are told to go out and share the samples with all their friends, creating a positive “buzz” about a product.
Being the caring and loving husband that I am I totally ignored my wife as she told me about this.
Nectar of the gods…in bar form!
I paid more attention, however, two weeks later when a package showed up in the mail. She opened it to find a box filled with free candy bars.
Specifically, they were the new Take5 candy bar from Hershey. The Take5 Bar is a pleasing and original conglomeration of pretzels, caramel, peanuts, peanut butter, and milk chocolate. I haven’t checked, but I think each small candy bar has approximately 12 bazillion calories.
I tried one. It was damn fine.
In fact, I went ahead and joined BzzAgent that very day and, sure enough, two weeks later we had a second box of free candy bars arrive at our doorstep.
Here I am, a fat guy, with a two boxes of free candy bars arriving on my doorstep like manna falling from heaven. The candy bars arrived with a little card which told me to have one or two and then share the rest with friends and coworkers.
Pffft. Right. They never made it out of the house.
Not a one.
So, yes. They are good. Very good in my opinion. Too good, really.
My wife had a few, but over the next few days I somehow managed to down just about every single Take5 Bar sent to our home. I was tempted to sign up with a dozen more fake accounts and have boxes of candy bars shipped to a dozen different locations, but I figured that was a bit excessive… as if eating two boxes of candy bars in a week was not excessive enough.
Because an angry bee is a great marketing logo…
But then I got to thinking about this BzzAgent thing again. I applaud it as a wonderful example of a guy pulling the wool over the eyes of a lot of very rich people. I’m not entirely sure how BzzAgent’s cutting-edge (and inevitably expensive) strategy of starting a “viral marketing campaign” is really any different than the ten thousand year old marketing ploy of “give away free samples and let people talk about it.”
Go ahead and join BzzAgent (it’s free) and see what you think. I have yet to figure out the truly cryptic and clunky navigation around the BzzAgent site and the only other freebies I’ve received are short excerpts from unpublished books.
Wow. Exciting. I’ve never seen a book excerpt before. How original.
Instead of paying BzzAgent to mail out 20 candy bars to the 69,000 people they claim to have signed up, I think Hershey’s could have just mailed out two small Take5 Bars to 690,000 people.
Of course, the even cheaper option that cuts out the BzzAgent middleman would be for Hershey’s to send out 200 candy bars to 6,900 different fat bloggers.
I’ll be checking my mailbox.
