Remember that consumer spending is 70% of the economy. If it’s working, everything else has to go really, really wrong to make either the market or the economy go sour.
If you’ve been online any time in the past decade you’ve seen them: ads that claim to have a weird trick that helps you to do something.Someone figured out that weird, odd, unusual, unexpected and unorthodox tricks grab our attention, and marketers have run with it. The “something” is often as weird as the trick, but someone must be clicking these things because as Slate‘s Alex Kaufman points out, they’re popular enough to have spawned their own advertising genre.
How does this work? In one of their brochures, direct marketing services company Harte-Hanks describes the GeoCapture service they offer retail businesses as follows: “Users simply capture name from the credit card swipe and request a customer’s ZIP code during the transaction. GeoCapture matches the collected information to a comprehensive consumer database to return an address.” In a promotional brochure, they claim accuracy rates as high as 100%.
