Friday 12 December 2008

Friends Reunited Shopping. WTF?

Surely this is a Friday afternoon joke? I've just had this email inviting me to try a Friends Reunited Xmas shopping site.
Great idea, I thought. Maybe ITV have finally cottoned how to use the site they bought up so far ahead of the curve back in 2005, and then completely failed to capitalise on. If they could use the (admittedly out of date and under-visited) data on there, potentially bring in Google Friend Connect functionality, Amazon style reviews, then they might be able to use Xmas shopping as a final desparate attempt to claw back some of that £120m investment. So I clicked on the link. This is what I saw:I mean..what? how? why would you show people this? Isn't this a holding page for unwanted domain names with the Friends Reunited brand in the corner.

Surely after spotting the rise of social media before any other 'old media
' company (although admittedly 3 years after the site got popular), buying a well trafficked site and then completely failing to build on it until well after Myspace and YouTube became the next big thing, you wouldn't want to email media planners to tell them how desperate you are? I hate writing critical posts, i like finding new things that are great and trying to work out why they are great, what makes me feel so good about them, but seeing this I just WANT TO KNOW HOW IT COULD HAPPEN

That is all

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good rant - the desperation around FR in sales meetings with ITV is palpable. Quite good for super cheap DR inventory though.

Post a Comment