Pay up, or the bunny dies. Pay up, and little kids starve.

This is not really about legal marketing. But it's about marketing. And it's about America. And it's about how dumb people are. And evil. And how wonderfully precise and exact and frightening marketing can be. I'm an adjunct professor of marketing here in Columbus and I warn my students that marketing, when done really well, is powerful. Do not abuse that power, I exhort them.

If you go to www.savetoby.com you will find some really, really good marketing. What is the web site operator selling? The life of his pet bunny. How do you buy it? By sending him money through PayPal or buying his merchandise. Kinda funny (if your sense of humor runs to dark humor and the absurd -- mine does). Kinda kooky. Kinda spooky and creepy. Kinda, "Geez, what'll they think of next to make an easy buck on the Internet?"

It's one of those things that as soon as you hear about it you need to turn around and talk to the guy in the next cube and say, "Have you heard about savetoby.com?" Or one of those things that you end up writing about on your blog.

Except that my point doesn't stop with the "News of the Weird" angle. It stops with these little factoids from the UNICEF pledge page:

• $15 a month can feed three children for almost four weeks.
• $25 a month can provide vitamin A for 7,500 children.
• $35 a month can provide two sturdy tents for families struck by disaster.
• $50 a month can provide clean water for four villages.
• $70 a month can provide lifetime immunizations for almost 50 children.

I ain't no preacher man. Maybe someday, but not today. I'm just a marketing schmoe with a small soap-box and a couple pals who pop by once in awhile. But let me do some math for you, my friends. As of today, savetoby.com has raised $28,372. That money, given to UNICEF, would provide lifetime immunization for 20,265 children. I'll let you do the math on all the other giving options.

So while most of the people who take a gander at savetoby.com are going to be all weepy about some nimrod's plan to whack a rodent, I, personally am a bit more perturbed about the number of people in our fair country who have allowed the marketing of savetoby.com to somehow penetrate their minds and souls to the point where they feel that saving a varmint is worth more than saving people. Especially when millions of animals on the same rung of the food-chain as rabbits go into the grinder all the time.

I myself eat chicken, fish, pigs, cows and tiny-tasty-shrimp. I do it almost every day. I own a dog. A 13+ year old basset hound named Eleanor Skywalker Roosevelt. My 5-year-old son has a blue Beta fish named WhaleShark that he loves like mad. Are these facts inconsistent? No. Some animals are pets, some are food.

Savetoby.com uses marketing to blur the line between food and pets. By confusing visitors it gets them to do something stupid. And that's evil. I don't think that killing a rabbit is necessarily evil. I don't even think that building a website to talk about potentially killing your rabbit is necessarily evil. After all, rabbits is still stewin' meat in many parts of the world. But by using good marketing techniques to prey on people's sympathy, Mr. Savetoby doesn't add anything of value to our world. He's tricking people into thinking they're doing good,when in reality they're doing something dumb.

And tricking people is evil marketing.

Don't give any money to save Toby. Give it to UNICEF. Or to the ongoing tsunami relief efforts. Or to a local soup kitchen. Or to your own church, temple or mosque. Or to the guy on the off-ramp with a cardboard sign. Those are real. SaveToby, while brilliant, is right out of the Dark Side of the marketing book. It makes me angry, it makes me sad, and it makes me want to do something else besides marketing for a few days.

Comments

[Joel S.]

I agree that it's disgusting. And I can see where this is going next, which is to the "pay me $x or I will abort my baby" site. The problem with the internet is that it's almost TOO effective for marketing -- any new idea (a picture of the Pope on your french toast, etc.) can be found by at least a few suckers willing to throw some dollars at it, no matter how insipid or evil your intentions.

[Gerry Riskin]

Andy, thanks for doing your best to crush this cockroach - it looks like PayPal has cut him off - and I wonder if that amount was phony anyway - I hope so. Gerry