Reno, I Love You But You’re Embarassing Me!

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A couple of Saturdays back I had to spend the day at the office to get caught up. You know how that is, come Friday you realize that you haven’t gotten to all the tasks on your plate so you have two options: 1) Get to the office over the weekend and work a few extra hours, sans distractions, or 2) wait until Monday to get caught up. Of course we all know the latter doesn’t ever really work because come Monday you start the process of getting behind all over again. Stupid Mondays.

So the other Saturday while putting in a few extra hours I had left to grab a burger with the King. All was going quite well until I headed back to the office and saw this:

OK, now before you think that I was driving through a residential neighborhood, I wasn’t. This was no lame residential attempt at a Halloween decoration. This was a lame business to advertise a Halloween sale. I kid you not.

But wait, there’s more.

Do it right or do it cheap?

I’m all for saving a few bucks here and there and finding ways to do things less expensively. That’s just my nature. But I never put saving a few bucks ahead of doing things correctly. The way I see it you always have four options:

1) Do things inexpensively and right
2) Do things expensively and right
3) Do things inexpensively and wrong
4) Do things expensively and wrong

I put those in order in which they way they should be done.

All too often people consider cost first and foremost. Whether it’s the right or wrong way is always secondary. Their methodology is more like this:

1) Do things inexpensively and right
2) Do things inexpensively and wrong
3) Do things expensively and right
4) Do things expensively and wrong

The problem is, when you only look at price, you simply end up doing things this way:

1) Do things inexpensively and wrong
2) Do things inexpensively and right
3) Do things expensively and right
4) Do things expensively and wrong

Obviously that is the path our good friends at Reno’s Internet Auto chose. When it comes to spending money on your business, or any kind of marketing, you should never, NEVER choose a path based on expense. Never. Always first look to see if it is the right or wrong way to do things. Once you know the right and wrong way to do something then you can start looking at your pricing options.

I’ve been reading Mike Moran’s new book Do It Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules (IBM Press), But I don’t think this is they type of “do it wrong” he was talking about.

That’s the great thing about the web. If you don’t like something you don’t have to view it. You simply don’t visit that site again. When you see stuff like this offline the only course of action you can take is take a different route. And that doesn’t work for everybody, especially those who live and/or work nearby.

From what I understand, this isn’t the first time Internet Auto has walked this path. Diana tells me that they’ve done this before. Many times. I’m not big on government intervention, but aren’t there regulations on public advertising? This is really nothing more than visual spam, and we don’t need that.

C’mon Reno, we can do better than this, can’t we? Well, I guess every city has something to be embarrassed about.