You are right, they never did admit that the lie was against corporate policy and they never said that any actions were taken against Tai for breaching it. They used weasel words throughout and tried to skirt around the side of the issue without dealing with the main complaint.

I understand how ethics and truth are the underpinning of the relationship you build with your customer (former computer salesman - shop floor). We had one guy on our team and everyone knew that when he was talking to a customer, one of us had to be listening in and intervene where necessary (he really would tell them that the computer would make them toast and tea in the morning).

Also - you are the winner of the Internet for using the word ‘mendacious’ twice. Sheer brilliance.

Keep on fighting

Sadly, I don’t think I got them to come clean — they were very careful about not repudiating this approach, trying to claim it was all a big misunderstanding on my part. I’m not confident they’ll find “some other slimy approach” because they never even said they were done using this one.

The other day I got one of the “I really love your blog and the product I want to advertise is sooooo compatible” approaches. I personalize this sort of thing. It pisses me off no end to spend even a moment considering how what I write and surgical penis enhancement have anything in common.

Good for you for pinning these guys to the wall!

Hugs,

rg

Tailynn appears to be unrepentantly dishonest. Jeff Sue, another “account manager”, has proven himself willing to deny the obvious lie in the best tradition of the Iraqi Minister of Defense. (“American tanks? What American tanks? There are no American tanks within a hundred miles of Bagdad! That noise you hear is not tank treads, it is air conditioning equipment!”) Etology’s CEO, Brock Purpura, was copied by Jeff Sue with Jeff’s spin letter, and provided by me with a link to this post and comment thread, but he has chosen to remain silent. Etology’s failing here is not (has not been demonstrated to be, I should say) a deliberate policy of deception; rather, Etology’s failing is thinking you can lie to bloggers in the internet age and then pretend you didn’t, with no loss of reputation to your company. Basically, Etology is showing itself to be a “doesn’t get it” old-media corporate dinosaur, which is pretty funny for what is supposed to be one of the cutting-edge internet-media advertising companies.

Is this a misguided attempt by a single company or a trend in attempts at marketing in the larger business scale?

While the small business community cannot afford to lose trust, larger companies tend to ‘creatively interpret’ truths on a regular basis. Good examples so far; healthy food that isn’t, luxury vehicles that may not be (anyone notice that the Escalade and the Avalache are incredibly similar?), etc.

I’m not out to start a political issue. I’m just wondering if this attempt on Bacchus was by a company that thinks (incorrectly most likely) it will be successful by following the same model.

It’s my opinion, and the opinion of a lot of people smarter than me, that the internet has changed all that. If you’re fly-by-night (so you can launder your identity every time you get caught) nothing much has changed; if anything, the internet may make such operations easier. But if you’re a real company with real offices in a real place and you have a real reputation that matters to your business, it’s now the case that the cost of getting caught is much higher than it used to be. Companies have been destroyed, or taken very serious hits, because of single instances of misbehavior; if it happens to go viral on the internet, a single misdeed can wreck years of reputation and goodwill.

Which is why I called lying to bloggers “stupid” in one of my etology.com emails. I don’t have the sort of blog that’s likely to take this particular set of lies viral, and these lies are not sexy enough to do company-destroying damage in any case. But for as long as I run this blog, people Googling for info on Etology are going to find out about the company’s shady business practices, and some of those people are going to care, and choose to take their ad inventory elsewhere. Was the benefit of the lies worth that reputation cost? I doubt it. If the company had repudiated the lies, they probably could have gotten away undamaged; but given repeated opportunities, they chose to go the spin and whitewash route, unable to acknowledge that there was anything wrong with the business practice. In the pre-internet era, that would have been smart business. In the internet era, it’s bone stupid.

But I think you probably wrong, as an empirical matter, in saying that lying is bad business. If it was, I’m pretty sure people wouldn’t do it. If salespeople were going broke doing it they would stop it. “Not working for you” is very different from “not working in general.”

For every idiot unethical salesman there are enough easy marks out there to feed the salesman’s children, don’t you think? I don’t know that… it’s just my sense of how the world works.

I mean all spam is playing the odds, and there really are people who will fall for Nigerian money transfer scams…