Attack Of The Clones

So what exactly is it with this industry that we seem to continually attract cowboys, idiots and charlatans?

If it is not make believe industry associations, the Earl of Knobworth told us a few years back “we figured we had no marketing budget so we decided to setup an industry association to help promote our business” then it’s Baron Von Screenscraping stealing content from sites that are too lazy to ban his spiders and web crawlers now claiming almost 11,000 email subscribers!

We were going to keep the latest news from you but when you read below you will see that there was no way we could; what with them being (heaven help us) on the “first page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing for the keyword DOOH” …

Good Day,

DOOH.com is receiving thousands of generic traffic visitors by owning and operating DOOH.com. (the Digital-Out-Of-Home industry acronym) We are on the first page of Google, Yahoo, and Bing for the keyword DOOH.

We am <sic> interested in any commission program you may offer as we are implementing an affiliate marketing program on our site. We are developing an online portal for the Digital Out Of Home, DOOH/Digital Signage Industry to assist with exposure and growth for all segments.

Our Mission is to assist all segments of Digital Out Of Home (DOOH)/Digital Signage and AV Applications through Online Networking, Education, News, Future Growth Opportunites and Searchable Directory Listings. DOOH.com is gearing toward collaboration with Fellow Colleagues, Suppliers, and Advertising Agencies as a whole.

We would like to include your company on our website creating
additional exposure for our Industry and your company. Please feel free to
contact us with any questions.

Sincerely,

Karen Coheley
Sales / Marketing
21st Century Advertising, Inc.
DOOH.com / Digital Out Of Home Industry Aggregator

Yep, that’s right. We saw some of these folks walking the floor in the Digital Signage Pavilion at #InfoComm2010 trying to drum up business – note ‘walking the floor’, not news gathering, not reporting, not writing, not filing stories, simply walking around asking for business (and next big event you just know that they will be walking around with a ‘press’ badge on). Now obviously the mass emails from collected business cards have started!!

Shame they cannot spell. The site dooh.com ^[2] is worth a visit just for its circa 10 year old look and feel BUT please, not too many clicks or you will be raising their Google page ranking (not).

We also saw that the Harrison family and their son Gary made another massive domain name land grab ^[3], purchasing the aptly named doohdooh.com ^[4] and re-directing all that traffic to their other USD 20,200 investment.

And finally please, don’t mistype anything like DailyDOH.com ^[5] cos’ you never know where you might end up.