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RC Car Craze: The Spam Connection
Rick Zeman writes "The Washington Post is reporting that the latest toy craze, miniature radio-controlled cars, is actually fueled by spam, and that spammers are actually helping brick and mortar retailers.
Dunno about you guys, but I get a couple of those a day...and I've resisted the 'temptation.'" The Washington Post wants to know your age, ZIP code and sex, and even provides you with hints on the first two.
...or read
the same story on MSNBC.
Powered by . . . Spam? How Mass E-Mail Ads Fueled a Holiday Gift Craze If there's a teeny-tiny remote-controlled race car under the tree a few days from now, you're at the tail end of a long chain of events that turned this toy from hot to white hot in just a matter of months. How popular are the little remote-controlled cars, sold under various brand names? Well, RadioShack recently limited purchases to two per customer. KB Toys had only three left at its Pentagon City store earlier this week. And the Discovery Channel Store ran out of them even before Thanksgiving and rush-ordered more from various factories in Asia. Guess what: Discovery's about to sell out again. "Our plan was that this would be the big toy for next year," said Ken Cutler, senior vice president of Illinois-based Hobbico Inc., which distributes one brand of the cars. "But this phenomenal craze kind of happened real fast." And like so much else in the Internet age, it also happened globally and with an assist from e-mail. Like just about everything in the toy world, mini-racers are a source of claims and counterclaims by rival companies. But if one toy manufacturer gets its way, the frenzy may subside as quickly as it began. They're called ZipZaps, Z-Car, MicroSizers, Micro Blast Racers, I-Racer -- or more generically, remote-controlled mini-cars. Most of them are made in China, and they cost $10 to $50. The story begins more than two years ago in Japan, where innovative toymaker Tomy Co. produced a speedy remote-controlled car the size of a matchbox with a motor smaller than the end of a pinkie. Tomy called it the BitChar-g (pronounced bit-char-GEE). The car's claim to fame, besides its size: It recharged in 45 seconds, instead of the hours it took most earlier remote-controlled cars to recharge for only a few minutes of play time. Soon the two-inch-long cars were being raced on makeshift obstacle courses at Japanese bars and atop desks in Tokyo's executive suites. They quickly became a pan-Asian phenomenon, with uniformed schoolchildren competing on playgrounds. The buzz was too much for U.S. toy companies and distributors to resist. Mini-cars began arriving at mass retailers and hobby shops in this country as early as this past spring. RadioShack had its ZipZaps, KB its MicroSizers -- and many knockoff artists in Asia tried to catch the wave, creating an explosion: minis, minis everywhere. Including in just about every American's You've Got Mail box. And that's when something interesting happened. There's some argument about this, but the daily barrage of e-mail ads -- two, three, eight a day to the same recipient -- seems to have pumped up awareness of the cars. That's right: Rather than siphon sales from the shopping malls, all that spam seems to have driven consumers to the stores looking for "that cute little car I saw online." This symbiosis doesn't surprise some retailers. "It goes without saying that we are benefiting from some of the guerrilla marketing that's going on," said Pam Rucker, a spokeswoman for the Discovery Channel Store. Nor is it news to mass e-mailers, the electronic equivalent of telemarketers, without the dinnertime interruption. "Retailers get a free ride from guys like us," said John Nesbit, vice president of Chicago area Internet marketing firm Penn Media, whose business now includes buying the knockoff mini-cars from a Hong Kong factory and selling them on the Internet. Penn Media sends millions of mini-car e-mails a day. "We go out and promote the living daylights out of something and the retailers get some of that benefit." To extend its reach further, Penn Media pays 25 contractors to send the ads to millions of e-mail addresses they have purchased from various Web sites.