Don’t get me wrong: I like guerilla and ambush marketing a lot. Especially when a smaller brand pulls a trick on a big competitor, just like Dutch beer brand Bavaria did with their Bavaria-babes during the soccer world championships in South-Africa. Nobody was hurt, although the FIFA took it all a bit too serious.
What Dutch utility company Nuon is doing at the moment, can also be considered as guerilla marketing. Companies are no longer allowed to spam consumers: only people that have agreed to receiving e-mails can be send promotional stuff. So now the marketing dudes at Nuon found a solution: they pay people like you and me for putting promotional texts about Nuon in your out-of-office reply during your holidays.
The vacations are coming and every day thousands and thousands of out-of-office replies will be send out. This is not considered unwanted e-mail, so when there’s a Nuon advertisement in an automated reply it will probably be totally legal. However, legal or not, I personally think it will be considered very unpleasant by the receivers of this kind of spam.
If you don’t see any problem in automatically spamming your colleagues, customers, suppliers, family and friends with unimportant Nuon stuff during your vacation, you have a chance to win € 2.000,-. I hereby officially promise that if somebody I know wins this price, I will personally subscribe him or her to 2.000 unwanted newsletters ranging from energy companies, loteries, insurance companies, kitchen shops and hammeroid treatment to adult diapers.
Photo credit: Michael Jessen
