Marketing killed the telephone. Is it killing email?

I still have a landline telephone, albeit reluctantly. While it’s theoretically useful to have a phone number where we can be contacted at home, the theoretical usefulness of this concept is destroyed by the mounting avalanche of calls that promise to lower our credit card bills or switch us to a different electrical provider, to say nothing of the hangups, the “hello? are you there?” calls, and the well meaning seekers of local office. Of course all of the above come from our area code and exchange, meaning that it’s impossible for us in a thirty day period to tell whether the call coming through is from our child’s school or from a telemarketer using neighbor spoofing to look like they’re calling about something of local interest.

This is old news. I would guess that if you’re under 50, the only reason you have a landline is that it came as a bundle with your internet and TV service. (That may be the only reason you have old-fashioned TV as well.)

But what I’ve watched with dismay over the last few years is the mounting marketing avalanche that seems determined to kill my email inbox, just like it did my landline.

Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m not talking about enlargement spam, or any of the other overt pests that used to fill our mailboxes. By and large, modern mail services and mail clients take care of that.

I’m talking about aggressive email marketing campaigns from companies that I actually do business with.

I have no idea why I receive three copies of newsletters from that bow-tie company in Vermont (though I suspect having filled in a different forwarding address somewhere along the way has something to do with it) or four copies of every email from Organizing for America. At least the latter is entertaining, since you can sometimes watch them test different optimizations for the subject line. But five or more emails a week from the kitchen store or the online music store, none of which reflect my interests or purchase history, seems to me like a bridge too far. 

That’s even before you count all the emails going to stupid people who think that my Gmail address is theirs. I’m looking at you, Teresa Jarrett and Taijah Jarrett and Ted Jarrett and all the other people who just can’t remember that they don’t have their first initial plus their last name at gmail dot com.

It adds up. I’m regularly deleting more than 50 emails a day unread. It’s worse sometimes when Teresa or Taijah or Ted sign up for a site that does its own marketing emails.

What kills me about this is that the failure of this communication channel that’s been a locus of my personal and professional interest my entire adult life is caused by the same thing that killed my landline. It’s marketing gone amok.

I have done marketing (of a kind) for a living, and I know the pressure of building the “top of the funnel.” The problem is that you can touch a heck of a lot of people at the top of the funnel and make your marketing numbers look great, only to have none of those people convert into business because they weren’t ever really interested in your product to begin with. But the challenge is that if you go the opposite route and try to target too precisely, then you’re dealing with the kind of surveillance technology that gives Internet marketing a bad name.

So what are you going to do? Well, it turns out there are a few sites that I regularly get email from where I actually read the emails. Religiously. Even though they update a couple times a week. Discogs is one, because it emails me about things that are relevant to my vinyl collection and my extended interests. But that’s information I gave them, not that they observed by watching over my shoulder. I think that’s the key — the information sharing has to be consensual and I have to get some genuine value from giving away my data. 

Cocktail Weekend: the Deadly Sin

Another long delayed cocktail post, this one about a creation I’ve been enjoying for years and haven’t shared yet.

The Deadly Sin is a cocktail I first came across in a now-defunct iOS cocktail app, Cocktails+. The principle is simple: take the Manhattan formula (two parts bourbon or rye to one part vermouth, add bitters and stir), and play with the vermouth portion by replacing a portion with a fruit based liqueur. In this recipe the addition is Maraschino liqueur, that delightful cherry based elixir from northern Italy—or Croatia.

Girolamo Luxardo S.p.A. is the best known producer of Maraschino that’s available in the States. The firm apparently started on the Dalmatian coast in a town now known as Zadar before moving to Torreglia after World War II. So the history of the distillery has war, exile, and murder behind it—appropriate for this drink.

So why Maraschino in this cocktail? Maraschino (along with dry Curaçao) were among a very few liqueurs available to Gilded Age bartenders like Jerry Thomas, who famously defined “fancy” cocktails to contain a splash of Curaçao and “improved” cocktails to contain both Maraschino and absinthe. (The imported liqueurs were thought to display the higher class of the drinker.) In this spirit, the Deadly Sin may benefit from a substitution of Curaçao for Maraschino.

Despite the classic flavor of this cocktail, the Deadly Sin is a relatively recent recipe credited to Gary Regan’s Joy of Mixology in my defunct app, though there is also a claim to the recipe by Rafael Ballestros. Enjoy!

Music roundup

There are a bunch of recordings and bootlegs that I’ve been trying to check out over the summer. Here’s the list, off my browser tabs and onto the blog:

Yo La Tengo: Two live radio sessions from 1997, circa I Can Feel the Heart Beating as One. Little capsules of perfection.

Herbie Hancock: 1972-03-25, De Doelen, Rotterdam, Netherlands. A surprisingly acoustic session from the Mwandishi period.

Prince and the Revolution: Dream Factory, via the Albums That Never Were blog. A reconstruction of the album that would have been Prince’s last with the Revolution and which eventually morphed into Sign ‘O’ The Times.

Musicophilia blog: The home of the 1981 post-punk magnum opus mixtape has no fewer than three big sets I’m looking forward to digging into: The Sensory Replication Series, which explores mixing ambient and atmospheric tracks with music of all other kinds and genres; Post-Punk 1968-1977, which locates the roots of the “post-punk” era in much earlier music; and Afrominimalism 1966-1978, exploring non-Western versions of minimalist composition.

Last, not a bootleg but something I’m really excited about, a lost Thelonious Monk session from Copenhagen, with Charlie Rouse on sax, cunningly titled Mønk. I’ve pre-ordered the 180g vinyl and I’m really looking forward to hearing the set.

 

September, I remember

It’s been a pretty whirlwind summer, jumping from England into Tanglewood to the normal August madness that is the Black Hat concert, to a week with my parents. And now school has started once again. It’s enough to make one really feel the passing of time.

The Boy has found his way a little into Harry Potter, speaking of the passing of time, and we’ve watched up through The Prisoner of Azkaban, which remains my favorite of the movies, some fourteen years after I first wrote about it. The timing of the arrival of a new wave of HP Lego is welcome; he got the Whomping Willow for his birthday and was eager to build Mr. Weasley’s Ford Anglia and the Willow. The bricks for the set’s section of Hogwarts have stayed in their box.

But the biggest way the passing of time made itself known was my visit to my Grandmother’s house. “Mama Linda,” as my uncle Forrest has always called her and which makes it easy for us to tell the kids which “grandma” we’re talking about, made her home with Papa Olin in a small house that my great-grandfather Zeb Jarrett built, and my grandfather added onto. Up until my grandmother’s death while I was in grad school, we still felt her animating presence throughout the house. Now, it seems more like a museum. Rearranged by my aunt, who modernized it a little, removing most of a wall between the kitchen and the tiny dining room and made it into something that could be rented, it sat empty until my aunt’s death. Now my cousins have redecorated it a bit, taking down some of my aunt’s generic mountain pictures and cleaning it with my sister’s considerable help. But it still sits empty and waiting.