Get This Man a Doctor

These past few days in Miami I’ve had the opportunity to cruise its mean streets. I saw these bus benches on the side of the road advertising a service called “Google BenchAds”. I have to keep up on the online marketing world, so the prospect of Google entering into the physical media market seemed like a big news story.

The picture reads, Your Ad Here: Google “Benchads” 1-800-4-BENCHADS. Become Part of Nadel’s Growing Media Co.

Google is one of the largest providers of online marketing media on the Internet. AdWords was launched in 2000 to provide a revenue stream, but in 2002 it was redone to conform with Google’s user-centric philosophy. Rather than deal with large corporations trying to target large demographics, as most marketing had previously done, Google AdWords allows small companies to target individual keywords. Although the effects of this revolutionary method have been underutilized and barely understood by marketers, its success has been part of the (dare I say it) leitmotif of the past five years of Internet advertising—the emphasis of direct communication with the consumer over demographics and uniformity. Of course, the fact that the past five years of Internet development in general has been focusing on communication and individuality is hardly a coincidence.

But enough preaching, the point is that my first reaction to seeing that bench was to imagine Google participating in some form of real-world corollary to AdWords, probably linked with its online twin. I imagined marketers being able to buy keywords and also checking the “BenchAds” option, selecting geographic regions where they would like their ads to be shown.

So I got home and starting researching, finding a few people who also found the benches, but still no indication that Google was associated with them.

I finally found the company’s site when it dawned on me that, distracted by my fantasy world, I had misread the benches. The benches weren’t associated with Google—the company was simply providing a resource location in the form of a search engine query. So I was just supposed to Google for the word “benchads”.

It’s still an interesting case in Internet marketing, considering how domain names are overemphasized. Some marketers seem to think that people are going to 1) Remember their domain name, and, 2) Type it into a browser when they get home. While a memorizable domain name is necessary, it is rarely useful to publish it or expect people to use it. The most common way we share sites (other than hyperlinks) is to say something like, “Just search for X”, where X is some unique keyword guaranteed to bring up the site as the first result. So I’m glad to see that some marketing companies out there are actually competent enough to realize that.

Since I got all of my ten applications in on January 15, it’s interesting to see how often the different schools contact me. For example, my long shot choice Berkeley sent me one automated email when I submitted my application more than a month ago, and hasn’t sent me anything else since. U Oregon, probably smoking something, has sent me not one but two information packets about their residence halls, and nothing else.

NYU, on the other hand, has sent me a sequence of three confirmation emails, followed by a physical confirmation in the mail, followed by another email from an administrative assistant somewhere, all within two weeks of when I started my application. What’s weird is the experience I’ve had with contacting NYU in the past.

When I moved to New York in 2005, I didn’t have a job lined up, so I tried to set up some interviews for when I got here. One of the places I desperately wanted to work was NYU; since I knew was going to grad school, the free tuition benefit was a pretty sweet perk.

NYU’s HR department has something called the MATCH system. All I remember is that I applied to at least ten jobs through their site and never once received a response. I even stooped to calling someone in the HR department, and, in true stalker fashion, showed up at the IT department, stopped one of the Directors in the hall, and asked him just what had happened to my job applications. You know, now that I think about it, I’m surprised that I’ve never been detained by security.

I kept applying for every job I could find between September of 2004 and May of 2005, and finally got called into an interview at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (which, by the way, is pretty sweet). The guy who interviewed me said that I was a good fit for the job, but that they almost always hired recent NYU graduates. In fact, he claimed they were required to interview a certain number of outside candidates, but they generally never hired them. A kind euphemism for why I didn’t get the job? I sure hope so.

Since then, I have repeatedly sent emails to various people at NYU for a number of reasons. Once, I sent an email to some event coordinator about a graduate school fair they were holding. Then, I sent an email to the Courant Institute asking them to clarify blatantly contradictory information about their application process. Nothing back. I still have no evidence that any person actually saw these emails… I was pretty sure that I had been blacklisted by their mail server as a spammer for the vast number of times I’ve tried to contact someone there.

Now that I’ve paid their $80 application fee, I’m their best bud. Well guess what, NYU. It’s going to take a lot more than that to win back my heart.