Fun Friday: We're Just Collecting a Little Marketing Info, Please Just Don't Move...

I've chatted on occasion about consumer issues like the built-in failure mode design of the non-titanium vaio (see Remember when "design" meant "reliable"). But these are primarily good tech designs gone bad for cost / supply reasons. What about when we make good tech go bad because we want it bad? Well, marketing people are exceptional at this, except when they get caught - then they yell and complain and say they didn't understand the tech. Well, should we believe them? If you do, I've got a bridge I'd like to sell you.

Well, got another one for you. Speedstick is running a "win a roadtrip" contest. If you purchase a product, you have a pull-off sticker with a code. You go to the site http://speedstick.com/roadtrip, input your contest code under the peel-off label, and enter your personal info. So just to see how they run this little "contest", I decided to visit the site and play exactly by the rules to see if they do. And would the answer surprise you? Maybe not...

So after you enter your code, the page comes back announcing that you will receive an audio announcement of your results. However, it doesn't play one. If you refresh, it refuses to replay, so you have no recourse to diagnostics. And if you try to reset, it refuses to take the code again because it has already been input.

As a technologist, I am fully aware that it is very difficult to deliver an audio file to many locations. This is why you deliver a printed message as well - since you are already able to read the page, you are ensured that you can receive the results. By supplying an unauthenticated audio file, they can easily avoid any real notice as to the results. And if the audio file requires more action on the part of the user, the user cannot act because the results have not been delivered.

In other words, they obtained marketing information by running a fake contest. Results on an entry do not have any posted restrictions or notice on use on the containers. Simply enter your code and find out if you win.

I believe this is a harbinger of the many possible marketing frauds one can do to obtain information by promising to deliver results but using the ideosyncracies of technology to avoid notice. And as we all know, verbal notice is not the same as written notice.

As a technologist who writes on tech trends, this smells and looks like a typical marketing phishing expedition run by a real company hiding as a "contest" in disguise. Either that, or they've got really incompetent tech and marketing personnel, and should be handing out pink slips. I'll let you decide which is more likely.