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PR Firm Unwisely Tangles With Penny Arcade
New submitter FSWKU writes "Courtesy of Penny-Arcade, Paul Christoforo of Ocean Marketing provides a perfect example of what not to do when interacting with customers, especially if you are doing so on behalf of another company. There's name dropping, an ego trip worthy of Charlie Sheen, and even what appears to be a promise to commit libel. Other outlets are already picking up the story and running with it, and an examination of Ocean Marketing's website has generated accusations of plagiarism."
At least Charlie Sheen's ego has some success to support it, what has this guy done other than troll the entire internet?
Personally I'd rather have my idiots at home glued to the TV than out doing idiotic things
of how not to do your job. I have been laughing all day at this debacle, and will continue to do so. This is a comedy goldmine.
I'd like to propose a new Internet meme: "Dave with a V".
From the article:
"You placed a pre order just like any software title the gets a date moved due to the tweaks and bugs not being worked out and GameStop or any other place holds your cash and im sure you don’t complain to activision or epic games so put on your big boy hat and wait it out like everyone else."
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Well, now your little tirade has been Slashdotted. I hope you take your pwning like a big boy.
their servers need to put on their "big boy pants"
with people who buy ink by the barrel. That's an old saying about fighting newspapers. What's the best way to update that for the internet? "Don't pick a fight with people who have huge daily unique views." "Don't pick a fight with people whose backlinks beat 5 digits." Help me out here.
I was one of the lucky customers to order an Avenger PS3 on Dec 5th via Amazon. There were only about a dozen reviews on amazon, and mostly positive, so I placed the order. I waited for about a week after the amazon estimated shipping date, and asked why my status was only "Shipping soon". Their first reply was that it was a pre-order, and that Amazon got the date wrong. I never saw anything on the product page to indicate it was a pre-order. They said that the product would be shipping Dec 17th. I waited 9 more days, and asked why it was still "shipping soon". At this point, I suggested that they do the right thing, and contact all the amazon customers and let them know the status. They pointed me to their order page (not through amazon) which had an update, but no specific date on it.
Today, I saw all the posts and reviews at amazon, and canceled my order. I commented that the reviews on amazon had bottomed out, and that I had lost all confidence in the product and company. The reply I got was simply "It's spam". Yeah, 128 1-star reviews from different people, and it's spam. This guy is already living in his own universe.
Now maybe if just N-Control had there own Marketing maybe they would not end up as part of this mess.
Seriously. Re-read the e-mails and ask yourself, "Does this sound like something a sociopath would say?"
If you don't know what a sociopath is, then read Snakes in Suits.
Go Penny Arcade! Not only do they run one of the oldest and kickass web comics for games, they run their own gaming convention, their own charity called child's play (its mentioned in the email thread) and they've featured jack thompson on the comic a bunch of times along with the modest video game proposal thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Video_Game_Proposal
Thank you for your email. Due to the overwhelming customer feedback we're getting from the situation with Ocean Marketing we are asking those with specific product related concerns to send emails to customerservice@avengercontroller.co Please know that Ocean Marketing is no longer handling any PR or customer service for our company. We apologize to our customers for Ocean Marketing's remark to one of our customers. We at Kotkin Enterprises know that it's our customers are the true arbiters of our products success and we would never intentionally jeopardize what we see as a relationship between us and our customers. We hope that this incident hasn't put you off of purchasing a truly revolutionary controller. Thank you for expressing your concerns and we hope for your continued support in the future. Kotkin Enterprises Avenger Controller Customer Service Team
The 'Ocean Marketing guy' is a made-up character in a MacHeist stunt that spiraled out of our control. We are very very sorry.
These aren't personal e-mails. This is akin to Microsoft telling you to fuck off. One bad employee shouldn't ruin it for the whole company, but who allowed this guy to be part of the team in the first place?
FYI, Ocean Marketing is now Ocean Stratagy - same guy, same service - he's even directly insulting magazine editors now!
The reply I got was simply "It's spam"
Here's the problem: I'd bet money that at least 1/2 of those *are* spam. Vindictive pricks who bomb the shit out of product review scores are becoming more common. They'll negatively review products they've never seen from companies or people they've never spoken to because of the author/companies political views, PR gaffs, a nerd-o-sphere uproar like this, etc. They'll organize campaigns to bomb the reviews of every single book from an author or every product from an entire corporation for purely political or vengeful reasons. We've discussed this problem on slashdot many times before.
These self-righteous bastards view it as some kind of justice, when in fact they're just polluting the review ecosystem with lies, hearsay, and crappy manifestos. If the product or company is that bad it will become clear, from the legitimate reviews, quite quickly. No need to break out your weird brand of street justice and fuck up the system for everyone.
This time the people at Ocean Marketing are arrogant, mismanaging pricks; most of the time you can't be so certain when you see this kind of event unfolding.
Honestly, when I was reading the Penny-Arcade post I started wondering whether this was really just a vengeful ex-employee, or even corporate espionage from another vendor. It wasn't until I read multiple older reviews and forum posts corroborating this story that I became convinced otherwise.
Beware internet justice: you never really know who's behind the keyboard or just what kind of destructive, ignorant campaign they're running.
Seems to me the customer has a right to be pissed off if the company is screwing him around and then insulting him on top of it.
1. Spell your companies name wrong many times on your website and twitter, plagiarizing content for your site from other sites. ...
2. Give cryptic responses to a query on the progress of an order from a customer.
3. Go on a trippy, grammar and spelling free email rage with the customer and an owner of a successful and popular website.
4. Threaten the people in step 3 and name drop any important people you met briefly or have no association with what-so-ever.
5.
6. Profit???
Also known as ... how to implode a company overnight.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/paul-christoforo/1/295/835
Feel free to use his LinkedIn page to contact those he knows to bring attention to this situation.
While I agree with your sentiment, once you send something to someone else, even a letter, it belongs to that person and they can do whatever they want with it... (and Mike's event, PAX East, was mentioned and he was subsequently CC'd into the thread). As for the reasonableness of the participants, the Golder Rule should still apply -- though I'm guilty of ignoring that too sometimes - as are others here on /.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
But to post these private messages without permission and set a mob on the guy is completely unethical.
The guy (Ocean Marketing) was acting in his capacity as a Customer Service representative. Nothing he says is private if the customer doesn't want it to be.
This should be entertaining to me; it is a pretty sweet burn to someone that appears to deserve his fate. Yet I can't laugh at the exchange; it's like taking joy in reality television. Many people do, but I just feel dirty watching the downward trajectory of humanity. Is the customer that less of a dick? Is his motivation at making this exchange public to help other frustrated gamers or to make revenge so sweet and cold? The motive is probably somewhere closer to revenge than help.
Penny Arcade told the guy it was going to be published in an article about the events, and the Ocean Marketing response was, "Great !! Love PR".
He shot himself in the foot, emptied the clip and then reloaded.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
The customer certainly started out about as polite and reasonable as one could possibly expect for any situation. I don't see him as a dbag at all.
Wax on, wax off baby!
Don't post negative product reviews to "punish" Paul. It won't (directly, anyhow). It will directly punish the manufacturers of the product, for which Paul is merely a third-party marketing arm. As Dave points out in his emails - the product is great and he truly feels the public should have access to the product. Trying to drive the company which manufactures it into the ground isn't going to help anyone.
Avenger has indicated they'll no longer use OceanMarketing after the events of the past day. This guy should be going down in flames on his own, not taking a great product with him. Sure N-Control, etc, made mistakes working with this guy. Sure, like most companies they saw only the $$$ but this is nothing new or unique to that particular organisation.
"The true measure of a person is how they act when they know they won't get caught." - DSRilk
These emails are also from the president and founder of the company, not some out sourced customer relations kid. So yea, it probably should ruin it for the whole company.
There *are* laws about delivery promises with mail order, particularly if there's prepayment going on. Notification of ship delays, opportunity for refund, etc.
Perhaps online sales aren't subject to these laws?
Otherwise, the might and fury of the postal inspection service will be visited upon the miscreant.
(and, if the payment was made by credit card, there's all those merchant card agreements to worry about... The credit card companies take a pretty dim view of merchants pulling the "pay now, oops we delayed shipment" thing, and pretty soon, you can't be accepting credit cards any more)
I really don't understand your logic here. So because the merchandise in question was a "toy" and the shipping deadline was "Christmas", the customer is a child and had no right to be upset that the advertised shipping dates were being grossly missed after he paid full price?
Read the whole exchange again. Dave was being a saint for most of the exchange (much more than I would have been were I in his shoes). He only exploded after the PR guy insulted him.
And the PA dude only kept reminding him that he was one half of Penny Arcade because PR dude was bragging that he knew the guys behind PAX (which he did not).
Since http://oceanmarketinginc.com/ uses GoDaddy, and the story of Weebly's fun with GoDaddy, maybe we just need to complain to GoDaddy to get the DNS for OceanMarketing removed..
For those who do not know, here is the weebly story:
http://david.weebly.com/1/post/2011/12/godaddy-a-glimpse-of-the-internet-under-sopa.html
Nor is it a valid comment. Anyone writing "Just Wow" or "Wow, Just Wow" is a fucking idiot and needs to stop writing until they pull their head out of their ass.
I never knew that! All I can say is Wow, just wow! Thanks for the enlightenment.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
The Federal Trade Commission's Mail Order Rule applies here. It's real simple:
Staples paid a big fine for this. So did the Beanie Baby people. In the early days of the Internet, a lot of companies were hit by this, because they had web sites accepting orders at high speed, but the back end fulfillment operation was manual and couldn't keep up. Now, most serious online merchants have the ordering system tied to the inventory system, so they stop taking orders when the inventory is used up,
Crawl back under your rock Paul.
A few months back, TheBloggess got a generic PR Pitch, completely disconnected from what she blogs about. She responded in her usual fashion, by directing them to a page that, in part, had a photo of Wil Wheaton collating papers. (See: http://thebloggess.com/heres-a-picture-of-wil-wheaton-collating-papers/ ) Usually, the PR companies that get this response don't reply or send back a polite response. A VP at this PR firm decided to reply to call her a "bitch". Did I say Reply? I meant Reply All. Including TheBloggess. An e-mail tiff ensued with VP claiming that the TheBloggess should be grateful that they sent her the pitch as their sending pitches to her was what gave her relevancy. She ended the exchange with "Please stand by for a demonstration of relevancy." Then, she blogged and tweeted about it.
Now, if you don't know, TheBloggess is big in the blogging world. She has almost 200,000 followers on Twitter and has a HUGE blog following. Her followers went berserk and inundated the company's Twitter account. Wil Wheaton who had posed for that photo on TheBloggess' site and who has almost 2 million Twitter followers tweeted about it. The PR company was forced to backpedal big time.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
... HBGary decided they would teach Anonymous a thing or two. I think Colbert could work with this.
So if you go to Ocean Marketing's website (www.oceanmarketinginc.com) you'll find it A) looks very amateurish, B) has misspellings (like "Firat Name" on a form) and C) has a phone number that, when called, is "not in service". Not exactly what you would expect a legit PR website to look like. Maybe this company couldn't afford to hire a more professional outfit but something just doesn't seem right.
The "maker" of the controller is a small company that realized that they couldn't make it themselves because they don;t have the capital, so they made an agreement to have a company in china manufacture it for them. The Chinese company probably did it for close to nothing, but the small company that placed the orders didn't get all their ducks in a row when it comes to manufacturing timelines etc. If you've read some previous complaints, they had previously hired another company to do their customer service for them, again most likely outsourcing because of a lack of capital. After a lot of previous problems, they lost that company. It's not clear if that company bailed, or if they fired them.
It then looks like they hired dave, Whose linkedin page basically says he graduated from Newberry college in 1992, then had no job until he started a small SEO company. SEO as many of you know is a soft art, as 90% of SEO firms don;t actually break the search algorithm, they just figure out some of the effects and learn how to game the system a bit. Well for some reason Avenger decides to hire this web guy to handle their sales and customer service! He was probably willing to do that for close to nothing, and had no idea what a Customer Service nightmare it was. Also previous customer service had made a lot of promises that he couldn't possibly keep, because the maker probably didn;t understand what was going on with shipping and customs and couldn't give him good information on what to accept!
That being said, what should have happened is he should have either - told Avenger he wasn't equipped to handle the scale of the problem, or required enough capital to pay for a team of Customer service people. But like most small business owners that fail, he was an idiot and buried himself and the company that hired him.
This stuff happens all the time, because small businesses operate on small margins, and when you grow to fast it is very very hard to control all aspects of the situation. That being said the controller looks pretty cool.
Internet dick-waving contest extraordinaire. I was with Dave until he wrote this:
In my book this puts Dave in the same douchey category as the Ocean Marketing guy.
Yeah, Dave is leaving this huge mess out there on the internet. If he ever is looking to do work that requires any kind of tact or delicacy, a five minute Google search will get him turned down for it.
If this is "not all that bad", I really need to see an example that fits your definition of "that bad".
Clearly it is bad...but there is worse: Gerald Ratner's after dinner speech. Ratner's used to be a high street jewelry store in the UK. This one speech wiped ~500 million pounds (possibly over $1 billion dollars with the 1991 exchange rate - even more in today's money allowing for inflation) off the value of the company, almost causing it to collapse.
...so even when it comes to disasters this guy is still not all that great!
Christoforo's Ocean Marketing Twitter account has had its name changed from the misspelled "oceanmarketting" to "oceanstratagy," despite the fact that "oceanstrategy" (a name devoid of any misspellings) was available
No. You're wrong.
It's important to expose psychopaths for what they are so that society can protect itself.
Dave was understandably angry. I would be also. But he was also rational and in the right.
Paul has all the earmarks of a psychopath. Note that he isn't giving up, is not shamed into retreat, is not changing tactics. Is not capable of thinking that he is wrong.
This sort of exposure should happen more frequently, with harsher results, with more informed discussion as to what psychopaths are, what their behavior traits are, and how best to destroy them. They are not human. They are manipulators, bullies, killers with zero hope of rehabilitation.
Exposing them is a duty, not an act of 'douche-dom'.
http://www.gameranx.com/updates/id/4224/article/ocean-marketing-s-paul-christoforo-has-a-history-of-domestic-violence/
Perhaps this is explainable, in the fact that David Kotkin and Paul Christoforo are 'bros' in real life. A bit of internet sleuthing reveals that the two run a business together in Miami called Afternoon Artists Inc. The relationship is hardly as innocuous as they would have any of us believe.
It would seem that Christoforo's own apology (via the previous Kotaku link), and Kotkin's decision to drop him come after the fact that he had been called out for his callousness, rather than from any actual sense of remorse.
Customer who dealt with Paul during the first half of the year:
http://www.natesnetwork.com/Poor-customer-service