Am I overreacting here? You be the judge.

By Gonzalo López Martí        Creative director, etc  /  LMMIAMI.COM

• Marketing & advertising trade pubs tend to be littered with manufactured press releases & carefully curated gossip.
• It is not necessarily good or bad, it simply is.
• It don’t hurt to ruffle some feathers every now and then though.
• Hence my friend & benefactor Eugenio “Gene” Bryan, founder & editor of this prestigious media outlet, kindly asked me to bring a creative’s POV to his kingdom.
• If possible, one devoid of makeup or sugarcoating.
• The harsh truth with a playful tone.
• Or, at least, the harsh truth as yours truly sees it.
• If we want our industry to keep paying our mortgages we must keep it on its toes.
• We must call into question our complacency, our tried & true conventional wisdom, our tired truisms.
• While protecting the tenets of our culture and the cohesion of our community.
• Every now & then, this mission requires to pick a fight.
• Welcome to another installment of our “Now that was uncalled for” section.
• This person whom I am responding to below in an open letter was very upset a few weeks back about being in the receiving end of an “email blast”.
• Said email blast was seemingly clogging her pristine inbox, so she hastily proceeded to send me an abrupt request to “stop sending her emails”.
• See below my exchange of pleasantries with this individual who, according to her email signature, occupies a position in the communications department (!) of a fast-growing company aka the Uber of the hospitality industry.
• In other words, her job is to clog people’s inboxes with press releases.
• LOL
• Gene says that I am overreacting and behaving like a child.
• He might be right.
• See for yourself & enjoy.

Dear Mrs XXXXXXXXXX

• What you received is just a good old email blast.
• It’s just editorial content, an opinion piece, a blog, no strings attached, no offer, no buy one get one free until supplies last.
• Said email blast goes out to thousands of “media, entertainment & marketing decision makers” every week.
• You can easily block it to prevent it from showing up in your inbox.
• All email client apps (Outlook, Entourage, etc) have the built-in feature to flag “junk mail”.
• You can also block it mentally, tune it out, plain ignore it, press delete on the spot the moment it comes in.
• Like most people do with unwanted email blasts.
• Actually, it’s easier this way.
• In any case, I’ll see to it that your email address is duly removed from the data base.
• However, please be advised that I receive an awful lot of unwanted offers from your employer.
• Junk mail, intrusive web banners, sponsored posts on Twitter, Instagram, you name it.
• We’re talking hard-sell promotional offers here.
• The kind of advertising material that a lot of people, like yourself it appears, consider cognitive pollution.
• Can you please stop it?
• Do you have any power in the company you work for to put and end to the onslaught?
• Or is it beyond your reach?
• It’s truly invasive and annoying.
• Here’s the deal: if you will not or cannot stop the intrusion I’ll install an ad blocker to remove all of your employer’s communications from my digital footprint.
• I’ll carefully sift through my desktop and mobile devices’ caches to remove any and all cookies that might be lurking there, sending your employer information about myself or my business.
• There is indeed a catch though: the one thing ad blockers cannot block: faux journalism.
• I am referring to all those press releases in disguise attempting to pass for legitimate news while trying to talk up the wonders of couch surfing with strangers.
• Funny thing is, these carefully curated and usually poorly written fake articles never mention the horror stories and disappointing experiences a lot of people have had with your employer.
• One-sided phony journalism.
• Stealth marketing.
• Is that the future we want for our business?
• A media world in which the wall between church & state -which is to say, editorial and advertising- is torn down?
• Every media outlet in the planet would lose its credibility in a matter of weeks.
• The reason why Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Yahoo and so and so forth are FREE OF CHARGE is, you guessed it, ads.
• We could talk long and wide about the pervasive culture of freeloading that the Silicon Valley business model has created but, for the time being, ads bring in the dough.
• Unfortunately, most attempts to create subscriber-only media outlets tend to confront a reality of solipsism, in-breeding and preaching to the choir.
• So.
• D’you have a problem with ads &/or similar forms of marketing communications?
• D’you think marketing is an intrusive annoyance?
• Well, you certainly have a point.
• Lemme tell you though: be careful what you wish for.
• An awful lot of people who work in “communications” could lose their jobs, if you know what I’m sayin’.
• By the way, have you noticed that your very email signature carries an ad?!
• Please remove it.
• It is invasive and annoying.

Thank you.
Gonzalo López Martí