The people who run the online dating site SpeedDate.com have taken the quest for new customers to ridiculous extremes. The service reportedly has purchased the Facebook game Oregon Trail — based on the classic game about leading a band of pioneers to the West Coast without drowning them or having them die of dysentery.
What does speed dating have to do with a classic educational game about leading a band of pioneers along the Oregon Trail, you ask? The answer is nothing. But that doesn’t seem to matter much to the folks at SpeedDate, who intend to ditch the Oregon Trail game, and replace it with their own SpeedDate application on Facebook. The purchase of Oregon Trail is simply a way to snatch up a bunch of users at one time.
Sure, there are ethical questions to raise about buying an application simply to turn it off and replace it with an unrelated application. But what kind of marketing is this? It’s symptomatic of the kind of thinking that says marketing is all about “eyeballs.” And it doesn’t matter whether those eyeballs are actually engaged in what we’re selling. As long as they glance at our product, we’ll count it as a marketing victory. It’s exactly backwards.
Even if 12,000 people log into Facebook to see the SpeedDate application, there’s no reason to expect any of them are interested in it. After all, they signed up to play a version of a 25-year-old educational computer game they remembered from their childhood.
So next time you think about what you’re doing to market your product or service, ask yourself whether you’re pulling a version of the SpeedDate/Oregon Trail bait-and-switch. If you’re just thinking about “eyeballs” and not about engagement, you’re missing out on a lot of potential marketing power.
I actually remember playing Oregon Trail when I was at school.
This move smacks of someone sitting in an office trying to figure out how to ‘do the social network thing’ – and deciding it was too much like hard work to earn people’s trust and attention.
Odd. And bad.