Marketing Method Blog

Billy Mays and Anthony Sullivan aren't happy about the negative attention ShamWow has brought to their industry.

A few days ago, Jay Weintraub of LeadsCon wrote another excellent blog post explaining the differences between traffic arbitrageurs and lead aggregators. While many traffic arbitrageurs are known for their “profit at all costs” mentality (even at the risk of screwing over the customer) their actions end up affecting other online companies.

To give you an example of this type of situation in the offline world, if you’ve seen the TV show Pitchmen on the Discovery Channel which features Billy Mays and Anthony Sullivan, two of the most influential ”pitchmen” who sell millions of dollars worth of product on TV, you’ll notice that they both have strict moral guidelines that they do business by. In some of the recent episodes, several of the production crew staff mock Billy Mays by simply mentioning that ShamWow can help anytime he runs into a problem. Well, Billy typically gets agitated whenever he hears this because ShamWow’s success has not only knocked off one of his cleaning products off the airwaves, but mostly because it doesn’t provide value to its customers.

“Offer” Vince’s ShamWow isn’t amusing others in the world of Direct TV Marketing.

Although I haven’t tried the infamous ShamWow myself, I have seen some amateur demonstration videos on YouTube which show that the product is far from the perfect item that it is on TV. And since ShamWow has a shaky reputation at best (Amazon.com shows it as having a 2.5/5 poor rating from its customer reviews), it will inevitably impact the expectation of the quality of other products sold on TV. It’s only logical that if people get burned once, they’ll be a little more skeptical the next time around.

The Costs of “Money at all Costs”

The money at all cost attitude of arbitrageurs affects online marketers just as badly. In fact, read this testimonial from a lady named “Julie” who lost money with the Google Money Tree offer. By the end of her statement, she declares that she is basically going to stop or limit her business on the internet:

I, too, got sucked into this and didn’t even realize that the $72.21 was coming out of my bank account until yesterday when my account was overdrawn and I went to investigate.

The Google Money Tree isn't endorsed by Google and sure as heck ain't a money tree.

That is when I found that they had been debiting $72.21 from my account for several months. I am an older person worried about retirement and medical expenses. Yes, I should have read all the terms and conditions, but they were long and tedious–lesson learned. I’ve stopped the debit with my bank, filed a dispute claim with my bank, filed a consumer complaint with the FTC, and e-mailed Google Money Tree to stop debiting my account. Will probably never recover the lost money, but at least I’ve done something to try to stop them from taking someone else to the cleaners. Yes, we all should have known better, but we are all worried about our financial futures–that is what scam artists hope for and prey on. Lesson learned? Yes, no more internet deals for me!’