The Bee Hive

My colleague pointed me to a letter a friend of his wrote to American Airlines, “breaking up” with them.

Dear American Airlines,

I don’t think we should see each other any more.

I know that’s hard to hear. But you’re not the same airline I met a few years ago. You’ve changed. And not for the better. Sure, you say you love me… that you’ll take care of me… that I am “Elite” in your eyes… but those words just seem empty now. I need you to show me that your love is genuine.

There’s more. Lots more. And it’s brilliant. Check it out.

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We’ve just launched a promotion on Magazines.com that spotlights titles printed on recycled or sustainably harvested paper. Earth Day wasn’t originally on our seasonal marketing calendar (silly oversight) so we pulled this together on very short notice, and I’m proud of us for making the effort.

http://www.magazines.com/ncom/mag/main/earth_day

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CNN Money, that is.

Omniture put out a press release about some of the success Magazines.com has had using their Test & Target (formerly Offermatica) tool, and it got picked up on CNN Money’s Marketwire.

And look!

“When specifying our testing and optimization goals, we wanted to deliver more personalized content to different types of people who visit our site. We just needed an easy way to do it,” said Kate O’Neill, director of customer experience at Magazines.com. “With Omniture we have one platform used by marketers for both testing and targeted content.”

And:

“Everything you think you know and every intuition you have as an online marketer can immediately be tested so you can determine if your marketing is working or not,” said O’Neill. “Omniture Test&Target has brought reliability to our marketing campaigns.”

Woot!

Update:

Also picked up in techrockies:
Omniture Signs Magazines.com

AND in the Huffington Post, complete with a really cheeky video “explaining” what Omniture does.:
Omniture Works Its Mojo For Magazine.com (Luckily, Magazine.com redirects to Magazines.com. Whew!)

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Clearly, Microsoft looking to acquire Yahoo! suggests a direct run at Google. And I’ve heard rumblings from people over the years about various Yahoo! products being superior to their Google counterparts: Y! mail, for instance, lead Gmail in innovations for quite some time before Gmail started catching up again late last year. And I’ve heard only good things about Yahoo!’s User Interface Library, though I personally haven’t spent a lot of time investigating it.

But MS and Yahoo! both have struggled to capture the public’s imagination nearly as much as Google continually does. It looks like a long shot to me. But if I were making the decisions at MS, I would absolutely do it. If nothing else, Yahoo! is a far less hated brand than almost anything Microsoft owns. Heck, that’s got to be worth millions all by itself.

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I’m kind of annoyed about the news that Home Depot is opening new stores aimed at women, but not nearly as annoyed as I am that they’re calling them “Her Depot.” I mean, seriously, wtf?

I worked at Home Depot some 12 years ago. I was a head cashier and worked at the special services desk, which was where large accounts and projects were tracked and managed. It was a pretty cool gig, mostly, despite the fact that I was only working there because I was making so little money as the head of the Language Laboratory at UIC. (Seriously, I was making, like $19K in a role that could be described as “head of a department at a fairly large state university”. It was ridiculous.) Even as draining as it was working a nearly full-time job on top of another full-time job, I enjoyed most of my time in the orange apron.

Also, if I may remind you, I own a house with my handyman husband, and said house has needed detailed attention from what amounts to nearly every aisle of the hardware store.

I mention those two things to let you know that I’ve spent more than my fair share of time within Home Depot stores.

And in all those hours upon hours of walking over hard concrete warehouse floors, I really haven’t noticed Home Depot having a problem pulling in female customers. They’re all over the store, though clearly there is a heavier concentration of women in the lighting, appliance, and garden areas. But even so, they’re there. And they’re buying.

So I’m just not seeing where there was this great need to spin off a store just for her. Which again reminds me of my other point: “Her Depot”? For serious? What kind of condescending shit is that?

I mean, not only is it condescending but it’s also short-sighted. It sounds like they’re looking to compete with the retail powerhouse that is Target, but they’re idiots if they 1) think men don’t shop at Target a lot; and/or 2) think men are going to be very eager to shop at “Her Depot.” Except maybe in gay irony or when coerced by the wife.

It’s just such bad decision-making all the way around. Kind of makes me want to go buy screws and power tools at Target, just out of spite.

HT: Consumerist

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Amazon has introduced a feature called “Lightning Deals” on their Gold Box page apparently as a direct response to the popularity of Woot.com. Cool. I dig it when the hip newcomer (relatively speaking) keeps the old-timer on its toes.

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Am I being short-sighted not to see the point in the new women’s travel center AA.com just launched? I realize there are safety implications for women traveling alone, and I realize there are planning considerations for families, yes, OK. And yes, many times the vacation planner in the family is the woman, but I bet it’s pretty often the man, too, so it would probably be better (from a marketing standpoint) to target that information and those resources and promotions to parents, not women specifically.

So beyond additional “smart solo traveler” safety concerns, what else distinguishes women’s travel needs from those of men?

Call me cynical, but this feels like way too heavy-handed an attempt to court the female dollar. Either that — or possibly in addition to that — and here’s where I hint at my e-commerce geekery — someone at AA.com just figured out how to segment their traffic and commerce data by gender, which revealed that women either spend too much or too little time or money on their site (I could speculate either way) and now they’re inventing excuses to draw more women to the site, draw us there more frequently, or draw us there and keep us engaged while we’re there long enough to buy a trip.

None of which are bad things — they’re just obvious. And the obviousness of it feels kind of, I don’t know, patronizing or something.

Or maybe it’s just me. Is it?

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