Bailout!
(offer ends midnight, November 25, 2008)
HOW DOES 15% OFF YOUR NEXT PURCHASE SOUND?
This week, I’m keeping it really simple. I’ve got a coupon code for 15% off your next purchase from Despair.com- and I’m going to share it with you. Right after this brief commercial interruption.
See, I’m still trying to build up the followership for my Twitter feed. One-thousand, one-hundred and fifty of you have already been kind enough to sign up- and I appreciate it very much. But that’s only 1% of the people on The Wailing List. One Percent!
I’m already humiliated enough that I’m a 30-something college dropout who slouched his way into the sordid marketing profession (and at Despair, Inc. no less!), despite having authored a great many unpublished screenplays, novels and speeches*. (I mean, how ashamed of your career do you have to be to tell your friends and family that you’re ‘an unpublished screenwriter’ rather than admit that, actually, you’re in the Response Generation business.)
Yet- (and you have no idea how greatly it pains me to type these next words)- I ultimately have to define myself as a Marketing Person. Yes, I’m deeply in the closet about it. If the closet were a wardrobe, I’d be so deep in it I’d be on the shores of Cair Paravel by now, trying to charter the Dawn Treader for a one-way trip to The Lone islands.
And since I am (ashamedly) a Marketing Person, I can not help but look at a 1% response rate and think, “Wow- I’m faring miserably at the very thing I am deeply ashamed to admit that I do for a living!” And then I feel new screenplays and speeches welling up from inside me and the vicious, pathetic cycle that is my life threatens to repeat itself anew.
One percent?! One percent of you have signed up for my Twitter feed! You guys/gals always give me much better than that in response to coupon codes and freebie promotions! In fact, it’s your reliable responsiveness to my product promotions that keeps me employed in a department that would prefer to see my job go to a certain scrappy, vivacious 20-something college graduate intern with a Marketing Degree from the SMU’s Cox School of Business.
I mean- I could drive up to Dallas right now- the city of my birth- a city constantly vying with Houston for the title of Shallowest City in the Central United States. And I could sneak right into the impossibly trendy Candleroom Bar (or UltraLounge, as they call it), a place where the wealthiest, most beautiful and vapid 20-somethings in that Mecca of Narcissists- many of them SMU students or graduates- go to “see and be seen“, and I could ask 100 girls there the shallowest line ever muttered in a bar, “If I told you you had a beautiful body, would it hold it against me?” and I would do better than one percent! Even if I do look like, in the words of the aforementioned SMU graduate coworker/competitor (and former Member of Candleroom- because yes, they require a Membership), “I cut my own hair”… (I am a Marketing Specialist and Unpublished Screenwriter, after all. At least a couple of girls there might be both inebriated and superficial enough to find that I which I despise most about myself to be worth taking a chance on… At least until they sobered up and got a good look at my haircut.)
So- needless to say- I’m upset.
And so- having subjected you to this lengthy series of postulations, admissions, digressions and confessions- I return your annoyed attentions back to my original promotional hook- my offer to provide you with a 15% discount on your next Despair purchase.
If you want to save 15% on your next purchase, all you need to do is… Subscribe to my Twitter Feed! Because I’m going to send out a coupon code via my Twitter account at 8PM Central Tonight! And- in the next day or so- I will be Twittering a sneak-preview of a new, limited-edition DespairWear Christmas tee! Remember how fast they sold out last year? Yes- in only a few days- they were all gone. Those following my Twitter feed will be the first to see this year’s edition- and will have a leg up on placing pre-orders for Christmas gifts!
Yes, I know many of you will just visit my Twitter page to try to find the coupon without bothering to sign up and actually FOLLOW me. I’m hoping some of you will make the tiny effort to create a Twitter account so I can actually consider it a successful conversion and bump my sad 1% response rate up. If I’m not interesting enough to convince you to get an account, there are other fascinating feeds out there you could also be following. The Onion. The Hammer. The Python. The Vader. The Shaq. Even The Intern (who I am plugging only because she was the one who inspired me to write this promotion, thanks to her endless complaints about the nightlife in Austin not being able to, er, hold a candle to Candleroom.) And even if none of the above suits you, there are 100 other wildly popular feeds on this page alone. Tragically, I’m not one of them! (Though I have at least managed to crack one site’s list of Top Twitterers in Austin. So I got that going for me… )
For those of you still uncertain what Twitter even is- check out this helpful online guide: A Newbie’s Guide to Twitter.
To those of you who are already following me- and/or are sick to death of hearing me flack my Twitter feed via The Wailing List- I promise this will be the last time this year that I make a hardcore pitch. From now on through year-end, other than a simple hyperlink, I’ll flack it no more.
Thanks for enduring my final lengthy Twitter pitch. And for putting up with my classic Bait-And-Switch with that Bailout setup. I really did plan to have a whole Bailout theme for this week’s promotion. And then a certain someone started talking about a certain club- in terms that were utterly exultant instead of appropriately ashamed- and I wound up here- having annoyed a lot of you. Particularly the good-looking Dallasites and Houstonians on my list. If there are any.
I’ll shut up now.
* Actually, I’ve only written a couple of speeches. And they’re mostly long-form rebukes of ex-girlfriends, intended to be delivered in the context of an Oscar acceptance speech for Best Original Screenplay Adapted From a Novel (that, incidentally, I also had authored)… It’s complicated.
