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Thursday 3 March 2005

Ad sales people [Lurks]

The bane of marketing folks like me (I know many of you consider us guys as the bane of your lives, so I thought you'd enjoy this) are advert sales people, generally from magazines but any sort of sales person whose job it is to flog services to companies. People like me are the primary point of contact and typically I get half a dozen to a dozen calls a day and each one fluffs up my company with praise and then plugs their title as if I've never heard of it and then hits me up for cash.
It's so bad that probably 1/3rd of my calls are from people I want to speak to and so I make good use of the office answering machine. Amazingly each one of these guys expects me to call them back which is akin to a door to door sales person leaving a note asking if you wouldn't mind popping around their house when you're free. In some ploy to make you return the call they don't say what it's about but their easy-going everybody's friend telephone manner gives away their job role easily enough.
So it amused me when today I called another senior marketing person about something or other and I got a telephone answering machine message that said:

"Hello, you've reached Bloke X at Company Y, I've given up answering my phone due to the volume of ad sales calls but if you aren't one of those then please leave a message and I'll get back to you. If you are an ad sales person, we make computer games so hang up now. If your title is useful for a company that makes computer games please also feel free to leave a message but know that I will not be returning your call unless I'm interested in advertising in your publication. If the matter is urgent you can call me on my mobile. If you're an ad sales person and you don't have my mobile number then let's be grateful for this small mercy."

2 comments:

  1. That's why you get a media buying agency to shield you from those cretins ;)

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  2. it actually infuriates me when they don't tell me what they are calling about. The worst ones are when they send you an email, then ring you to check whether you got it or not.

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