Cool Marketing Thoughts

A few days ago, I wrote about a funny campaign from the Belgian postal services. The mini-site showed a survey which people could fill out to see if they would be a good mailman or not. Three days after the campaign went live, a lot of fuzz started to escalate as the union of Belgian postal service demanded the campaign would be pulled entirely because it would damage the image of ‘all mailman’ (and mailwomen) in this country. They stroke back at the management and said the campaign needed to be pulled ‘or else’. Unions are a funny thing. I’d love to see them take on the internet, because you see: once something is online, it’s not really easy to just remove it from the web again. So, today I found a tip in my mailbox from a reader who said the entire campaign site has been mirrored. That’s not so difficult because all that needed to be done was fetch the .swf file out of the cache and upload it again. Everybody knows that.

What’s even harder to believe is the aftermath of this campaign, which costed a few thousand euros (indirectly ‘our’ tax money, as the Postal services get a lot of money from the Belgian government). The union blames management for approving a campaign like this, management says they didn’t know anything about it and blames the marketing department. Marketing department feels the rain coming and blames LG&F, the agency, because they pitched the campaign.

The campaign is a beauty. I don’t understand why any mailman should feel insulted over a funny take on the profession. It’s not like all mailman are killers because there’s been a movie titled ‘the postman always rings twice’, so why would they become bad because of a few humorous questions? You tell me, and then the union. I say those union guys are totally exaggerating. And please explain why an agency should take the blame for coming up with a good idea. The marketing staff of the postal services have approved and gave the ok. The fact upper management says they didn’t know about this is totally ridiculous. As if marketing can spend thousands of Euros without them noticing, without marketing having to explain where the money went. Bollocks. My tax money went to this campaign and I like it. It’s a good thing someone mirrored the campaign. At least half of Belgium will still be able to see what the fuzz in the newspapers was all about.

Enjoy this, Belgium: het postbode examen is back online!

Update: In case the Mac domain gets pulled, Steven points to a file host where you can download the .zip file with an html and .swf so it can be mirrored everywhere. You got to love the internet. :)

I’ll see if I can get it online here as well.

Update 2: Campaign seems to have been pulled at the Mac domain. Here’s a new mirror :)

I’ll search for more people who’ve uploaded it and link to them.

Update 3: I pulled 9 Gig hosting the mailman exam. I’m taking it offline. The file is 896kb which after some math (9*1024=9216; 9216/0.896=10286) comes down 10.286 views… in just about 2 days. That’s not bad.

I’ll find a new way to host it. Update on October 3rd! The .zip file has been downloaded 30 times, surely it must appear somewhere soon. Stay tuned!

Update 4: I’ve found a file which is hosted on a foreign account, I summon it here (but i’m not hosting myself). This will stay online until someone tells me not to. Enjoy!