They Can't Even Make Themselves Say It

This beer sucks. You know it, I know it and, apparently, the good people in the Natural Light marketing department know it, too. They can't bring themselves to use the word "natural" in their own logo.

In this first installment of a series I'm calling "Natural Plight," I'll examine the first of five Natural-Light-spawned marketing mockeries called "Nattyisms." The fact that they even attempt to position their beer as anything but a cheap way to forget that you're a complete loser is laughable. If you think about their marketing plan in any more detail than that, it might do serious damage to your central nervous system.

Natastrophe: According to the fine folks at "Natty Light," a natastrophe occurs some time just after some klutzy shit-for-brains wanders into a party at his older brother's frat house. Naturally, said shit-for-brains has brought a twelve pack of "Natty" with him to show his brother's brothers that he knows how to party. A resounding "nattaboy!" from the Northface chorus immediately drowns out whichever Jack Johnson song happens to be playing at the time, and young SFB feels accepted. His comfort level peaks as the featured artist changes from Jack to Rascal Flatts, and then he notices the throng of scantily-clad dick bait howling the lyrics of Maybury (or whatever the Hell that song about Cherry Coke is) atop every raised surface of the house. Distracted by his overpowering horniness (he's not used to seeing that much self-esteem-induced desparation this side of a computer screen), he backs into some chick and dumps all the Natural Plight everywhere. Uh oh--the night's ruined.

Spilling Natty Light is a catastrophe like spilling toxic waste is a catastrophe--you have to stop ignoring its presence, someone has to take responsibility for introducing it into the environment in the first place and, finally, someone has to come into contact with it in order to clean it up. Here's the bad news: unlike waste disposal professionals, the one responsible for a "natastrophe" has to clean up that liquid virginity with their bare hands. I'm pretty sure that's what made the Toxic Avenger the man he is today.

What I've Learned Should Piss Me Off as a Marketer

I'm going to take a more educational look at the world with this post. Even though my opinions usually do society a greater service than any mere facts can claim to have done, it's my opinion that a fact or two here or there never made anybody any stupider.

There used to be this foul practice in online marketing (Search Engine Optimization in particular) called "spamdexing." One can spamdex in many ways, but the end result is always a really pissed off Google. If anybody reading this knows anything about pissing off Google, it's kind of like shooting a spitball at God (pardon my sacrilege). Google have the power to knock you down one or a thousand rankings (kind of like demotion), remove you from their index altogether (kind of like excommunication) and generally make your webpage the scourge of the universe if they so wish. Needless to say, I'm writing about spamdexing in order to portray it as an unethical tactic in leveraging the web for corporate (or personal) gain.

Before I continue, I should mention that I'm not the one who discovered this practice nor am I the one who discovered that Google cries and stomps its massive, powerful boot every time someone employs it these days. I am, however, a male college student. So, my ego will help me talk about it as if nobody in the world besides me knows what it is. Consider yourself lucky.

Spamdexing's most rudimentary form uses hidden text on a webpage as a form of keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing is an attempt at acheiving the highest level of keyword density (desired keywords on page divided by total words on page) possible. Press ctrl + A and read below this paragraph to see what I mean.

bean burrito delicious taco chalupa gastrointestinal malfunction

If I were a taco stand with internet access and a webpage, I might invisibly stuff my webpage with keywords like the ones above. The fact that I chose "bean burrito," "delicious taco," "chalupa," and "gastrointestinal malfunction" means that I want my site, I'll call it www.flacotaco.com, to appear at the top of Google's rankings when people type them in during a search. Of course, Google wouldn't like it, so they'd find ways to make my computer spontaneously explode and my family disown me, so I wouldn't want to engage in hidden text spamdexing.

I ran across this interesting article about BMW written by a guy from Google. It shows another (more complicated) way of gaming the search engines by using a redirecting landing page. Whoever started this practice thought it would outsmart Google, whose algorithm recognizes hidden keyword stuffing now.

Fadvertising and How it Will Save the Human Race

Check out this shit.

If there's one thing I love, it's a good cliche. Man, they're great. Just imagine the doozie of a pitch behind that testament to creativity above. It probably went something like "sex sells." Ooh, that gives me chills.

What's really cool about the "sex sells" angle is that nobody's ever tried it before. It's fresh, and it'll no doubt surprise audiences everywhere who are used to mundane and unrewarding marketing appeals like decency and intellect. There's nothing quite like a swift love punch to the groin to take consumers' minds off the mind-numbingly uplifting appeals of companies like Dove and Hanes.

The really great thing about this campaign, specifically, is that it tells its audience exactly what they're going to get. It's really simple: apply some sweet Axe and enjoy the bum rush of a passion-rabid harem of women as you make your way from the front door to your mailbox to pick up your new issue of Hustler. It really works. As a matter of experimentation, I sprayed myself down with some of my roommate's stuff before I sat down to write this post. It may just be a coincidence, but I've been sexually molested by all of two harems since I started writing.

It's a great campaign based around a great concept that promises the market a great (realistic) reward: Spray More. Get More. Get more what? You know what.

Spray on a can and get ready to make an Axe of yourself.