The Copywriter Underground

I stumbled across this nightmarish press release on The Bad Pitch blog. I wish I could say I was surprised. It’s a U.S. Netcom Corp release that leverages the Virginia Tech shootings… to hawk a product.

I’d like to congratulate U.S. Netcom Corp for being the first company (that I know of) to crawl over the bodies of the slain in order to make a buck.

If you’ve got the stomach for it, here are highlights of the Press Release via the PR Newswire:

James Piatt, a student at Virginia Tech, expressed a sentiment that
continues to be repeated: “I’m outraged,” said Piatt. “And I’ll say on the
record I’m outraged that someone died in a shooting in a dorm at 7 in the
morning and the first e-mail about it came two hours later. No mention of
locking down campus, no mention of canceled classes, they just mention
they’re investigating a shooting a few hours later at 9:26am. Meanwhile,
while they were sending out that e-mail, 21 more people got killed.”

Virginia Tech President Charles Steger indicated that it would’ve been
difficult to warn every student because most were off campus at the time.

The fact is, Mr. Steger is wrong. Automated mass emergency notification
could have been used to save more than 20 lives that morning. Mass
notification should have been in place that would have given students more
than two hours warning of the events unfolding on campus, including
notification to students with cell phones who were attending classes.

Like the late-night ads say — wait, there’s more:

For $1 per student per year, services such as AllCall Notification
(http://www.usnetcomcorp.com) could have provided VT with a method of
crisis control capable of reaching every student far faster than email. It
should have been in place as part of the school’s emergency preparedness
plan.

There is a tragic lesson for every educator of every school-age
student: AllCall or other notification services can save lives. If it had
been in place at Virginia Tech, the situation could have been, and probably
would have been, much different.

I’m not wholly against discussions about what could have been done to save lives, but this is a clumsy, ham-fisted attempt to insert a product name into the discussion (before it’s even truly clear what happened).

It’s not about the tragedy or the students. It’s about the product.

That’s why sentences like “Automated mass emergency notification could have been used to save more than 20 lives” are so galling. And so damaging. I’m tempted to say this is a textbook study in marketing opportunism at its worst, but that’s a little sanitized.

It’s shameless. It’s bad marketing, and it’s shameless.

Which is exactly what I told US Netcom at the e-mail address at the bottom of their press release: jeff.warhol@usnetcomcorp.com

[tags]virginia tech[/tags]