From: UrbanDaddy (and J.Crew)
Subject Line(s): Read below to see the good ones... :)
Date(s): Tuesday, October 13, 2009 - Soon to be Discontinued
What is UrbanDaddy? Is it a "Who's your Daddy" kind of a Daddy and got my copy of Maxim magazine ready for toilet reading material kind of a Daddy... or a stroller pushing, farmers' market shopping, diaper changing, father of my children kind of a Daddy? Methinks J.Crew is betting on the former which is a bummer... because the latter type is more my kind of man.
I'm just not getting it... What exactly is the relationship between J. Crew and UrbanDaddy anyways? Is it a cross-promotion email campaign or full-on corporate sponsorship (like Johnson & Johnson being to BabyCenter what J. Crew maybe is to UrbanDaddy?) or something else entirely? And whatever it is, why is J. Crew pushing it so hard?
Fellow Smith-Harmon blogger Darrah MacLean wrote in an earlier blogpost about her annoyance with the difficulty she had trying to enter the contest for an NYC trip for two that J.Crew was promoting (said prize being J.Crew's enticement to get people to sign up for the UrbanDaddy emails). While I didn't experience the same troubles Darrah mentioned, I do think J. Crew could/should have done a better job of trying to figure out who the target demographic would be for UrbanDaddy before they sent out the contest email (clearly, they missed the mark with me!). My guess is that J.Crew sent the NYC trip promo email to their entire subscriber list without taking into consideration any segmentation. I'm know that I'm not that difficult to track - my cookies are always on - and I've only browsed/clicked/purchased in the women's and kid's departments... and now I am seeing these subject lines in my inbox:
*Rattlesnake Sausage, Belgian Beers and Satan's Whiskers
*Re: Meeting Up Tonight
*Your 7am Beer Is Here
*Late Night Booze and DJs in the Mission
*Endless Happy Hour, Bacon Biscuits and Gin for Days
(IMHO, some of these bear a strong resemblance to SPAM Subject Lines!)
To say that I find the whole "UrbanDaddy experience" offensive might be overstating it a tad, but something about their emails make me feel a smidgen uncomfortable and/or irritated. I know I have the option to simply unsubscribe (and I plan to - just as soon as I finish writing my little rant here), but I'm annoyed that I have to take the steps to do so. While I realize it's up to me to read the fine print, and that there's no real harm done, I kinda feel like a sucker for getting roped into signing up in the first place.
Ultimately, whatever the relationship is between the two, I'm having a hard time figuring out why J.Crew is associating itself with UrbanDaddy. The J. Crew man I picture is handsome, rugged and dresses with mad style (like my 'BabyDaddy') -
This is just my 2ยข... thoughts/comments anyone? :)
*Addendum - I am adding a little edit to this piece (strike-through on the last sentence). I did unsubscribe from UrbanDaddy and when prompted for my reason for leaving, I put the link for this blog in the comments section. Shortly after, I was contacted by Urban Daddy's Business Development Manager who wanted to know if I would be open to having a conversation about this piece. Uh-oh! No, actually, I called her and we had a lovely conversation, after which I realized that my words in this post came across a little bit meaner than I had intended. I guess publicly breaking up with somebody is never nice to do, and for that I can be "man enough" to apologize.
