Get the money in...but in the right way!

We recently cancelled our contract with a cloud services provider (who shall remain nameless). They're not a big player...and perhaps that was the problem.

We were hoping to buy virtual Windows servers from them, to host our enterprise software platform, so we'd signed up for a month to try it out. And during that period it transpired that the only payment methods they offered were PayPal or Skrill manual payments. No subscription service, no Direct Debit or even a continuing credit card mandate. We'd have to pay months in advance, to be sure of continuity of service.

Now, if it's, say, an online magazine membership, that's OK...ish. This isn't. It's the kind of service on which you build mission-critical systems - and those have to work, and be bullet-proof. Their failure is, quite literally, not an option.

So that led, with considerable regret, to the email I sent today:

(Please forward these comments to your management team.)

After due consideration, we have decided to terminate our relationship with [your company].

Although the Windows VPS service appears stable and fast, we cannot risk the commercial damage of having our mission-critical systems offlined by a missed manual payment, because you do not provide an easy automated funding option.

PayPal, particularly without a subscription option, is simply not a professional way to collect fees. It would only require one staff member to be ill, or on holiday, and a manual payment therefore missed, and our Windows-based enterprise platform would be downed. (To be blunt, we expect our suppliers to work for us, not vice-versa.)

And whilst there is the possibility of paying well in advance, we feel that our money would provide us more benefit in our own account, until needed elsewhere.

We have stopped our server, and hereby terminate our contract with you. Please cancel our service.

Jon
--
Jon Green
Managing Director, Adeptium Consulting Ltd. http://www.adeptium.com

The company in question had very helpful, friendly, tolerant customer service - their reply says volumes about that:

Dear Mr Green,

Thank you very much for your e-mail.

As requested, we will cancel the following subscriptions at the end of the contract:[...]

Even if we can not keep you as our customer, we would like to express our gratitude since we valued our business relationship very much.

We would be pleased to hear from you again, and we wish you much success in the future.

If you have any questions or need help, please do not hesitate to contact us.

There's a lesson in this. It doesn't matter how excellent your product, nor how keenly you price it, nor how helpful your staff: if you make things too difficult or risky for people to use your services, all the rest was for nothing.

It's a lesson I hope I remember when I need it!

Banksy, Billboards, and Targeted Adverts

So I got into a bit of a discussion on Facebook. It was all about some controversial, but interesting, words from Banksy. You probably should go read them, and come back to this. I even set up the link to open it in a new window, because I'm just nice like that.

A former and well-respected colleague, Wail Sabbagh, contended that billboards and the like were little different from postcard adverts in a newsagent's window. How I replied to that is what forms the main thrust of this blog. I said:

"I've spent too much time in the States to let that one pass! I hate in-yer-face advertising, everywhere; unavoidable. It's all "Look at me! Look at ME! Look at MEEEEEEEE!", and has recently led to the trend towards "annoyance advertising" - "It doesn't matter if you irritate the cr*p out of people so long as they're looking." The bloody-awful whistler accompanying one DIY barn chain's adverts is an example of that. In our house, it's target practice time for the MUTE button.

The world doesn't revolve around advertising, but that message hasn't quite reached the US: you have to go backwoodsing to get away from placards everywhere and TV that doesn't let you watch 10 minutes without badly-made sales pitches. It's an extreme - but it's going the same way here.

So I've sympathy with the sentiments behind Banksy's comments, if not his conclusions.

Although I'm not entirely happy with the personal-information culture behind it, I welcome the move towards targeted advertising. Instead of a gazillion products in my face, a gazillion-minus-epsilon of which I'm never going to want to know about, I get stuff that's actually relevant to me and has a chance of making a sale too, if they don't annoy me too much telling me about it.

I will be delighted when targeted, effective advertising undermines the case for big billboards, and for placards blighting every green and grassy roundabout, and we can finally do away with that environmental spam and see the world around us properly again.

Maybe Banksy has a point.

And that set me thinking further.

You'll notice, if you don't have adverts blocked, that there are ads around this blog too. I'm hoping they're targeted; that they are relevant and interesting to you. If they're not, tell me. There are things I can tweak.

Let's take it as assumed that, in a capitalist society, adverts are not optional if business is to survive. (Of course, the same is true in Communist states too, it's just that they're "advertising" state policies, initiatives, propaganda and the like.) Let's also assume that most billboards have little or no effect. They're an outmoded way of promoting a product or company: unless there's something truly novel being advertised, the expenditure is rarely recouped in revenues. There's limited evidence that TV advertising yields any better benefits for the price.

That leads us to online advertising, then. From a business perspective, it's fantastic. At last, there's a direct, tangible link between cost of display and revenues: the "click-through rate" and "completion rate" (CTR and CR) are metrics we can use to determine precisely how effective both the advert, and the spend on it, are. Better still, customer profiling, whether personally-identifiable or anonymised, based on prior purchases and clicked ads, allow the marketing industry to be laser-accurate in the types of adverts shown to a given viewer. They're going to be interesting. It's stuff that the viewer's already shown an interest in seeing, maybe buying. The CTRs and CRs don't lie.

And this could mean the end for billboards, placards, environmental advertising as a whole. ("Minority Report"-style personal promotion aside, but that's a while yet to come.)

The question is...how much privacy are you prepared to sacrifice, if it means we can finally tear down every advertising hoarding in your life?