A reader forwarded us an e-mail they recently got from KFNS, one of the approximately 17 sports talk stations in town, to show us how amazingly crappy their “E-Blast” is. They were right, it suucccckkksss! …but we weren’t exactly surprised and gather that the other stations in town offer more of the same, so they should all be paying attention instead of laughing at the back of the classroom while we whip out the ruler on poor KFNS.
In a word, we would describe this email as “insulting”. Insulting that they think their listeners…scratch that…their die-hard listeners that actually sign up for clubs, are stupid. They must if they are calling this exclusive content. We bet the KFNS brass also thinks they’re fooling people when one of their hosts does a live read just after they come back from a commercial break “Frank’s talking so it’s not an ad! He must just really want me to go to that tire dealer because it relates to the Cardinals somehow!” Come on. Despite the listener sample that calls in to your station to suggest we trade Holliday and Pujols for Jeter, they aren’t all that stupid.
We even went through this copy of the “E-Blast” and scratched out all the ad copy to get down to the actual “exclusive content”:
As you can see, it’s mostly ads. Ads their salespeople are running around selling you as an “engaged listener…who we have full email access to!” There is one thing that isn’t technically an ad though. It’s the box on the top left of the email…the one that’s telling you to sign up to be a KFNS Insider, which is kind of an ad…oh and also completely freaking pointless because the fact that you got this email means you already signed up for their club! Jesus. One little spot for content and you waste it on an internal ad that by definition won’t get any action because the users have already done what you’re asking them to do. It’s like sending out emails telling people to go get email accounts, or going around to the retarded folks that watch the show NCIS and asking them if you could hit them in the head repeatedly until they suffer severe enough brain damage to be labeled officially retarded and start watching NCIS. We guess you can technically be “more retarded”, which would involve also watching NCIS: Los Angeles. Ok, the latter example wasn’t great, but you get the idea.
To the people: Don’t sign up for these. You don’t get “deals”, you just get your email farmed out to any jackoff company that has a few pennies to give to [insert ration station here].
To the stations: Maybe actually deliver some exclusive content in these? …oh wait, that would mean you’d have to worry about actually making exclusive content, which really would need to come after the other content you don’t have enough of. We see your point now. It is much easier to just shove ads down the throats of suckers…er…we mean “cherished listeners”!
