Over-marketing

I am a member of a group that gathers for monthly social events. These events are not free and require pre-registration due to limited space. In the weeks leading up to each event, I receive messages every couple of days reminding me to “Sign up now!” And regardless of whether it is three weeks or three days prior to the event, there are always “Only a few spots left!”. (Does no one else sign up between 21 days out and 3 days out? If so, then the marketing efforts deployed every couple of days are completely ineffective.)

The best (read: worst) appeal to register is the “personalized” messages that I’ve received from the event hosts on Facebook Messenger. Each one is predictably structured: it always begins with “Hi friend!” (I’m not kidding—the minimal effort of typing out a person’s name is ostentatiously absent), moves into a reminder that the event is upcoming on [date], and concludes with something along the lines of “it would be really great to see you there!” Upon receipt of such messages, I’ve always called out the messenger by dryly responding, “Wow, such a personal message.”

I am wary of anything that over-markets, so such incessant bombardment precipitates the opposite of what I think is the desired response. The more a person says, “You should come to this event!”, the more I sense desperation (“OMG plz come, no one’s signed up!”). Such events should be able to speak for themselves without requiring an advertisement every three days.

Now, this philosophy of marketing does not apply to every instance of recurrent targeted advertising. A novel product, group, or event, for instance, perhaps must be widely and repetitively broadcast in its infancy stages to an external audience in order to inform of its existence and to generate interest. The events discussed above, however, do not need such exposure. Group members remain in the group because they have a maintained interest in the group’s events. Heavy internal marketing, therefore, is just wasted effort.

I experience a similar level of cynicism when people post photos with 15,028 hashtags appended—you know, where the string of hashtags is longer than the actual caption. (I don’t have a Twitter account—does the 140-character limit not apply to hashtags?) Within my circles, I see this phenomenon occur most often with “gym bunny” gay guys. Regardless of what the subject of the photo is, hashtags such as “#gay”, “#instagay”, “#[city of residence]”, “#gayboy”, or “#gaymodel” will always make an appearance. Two all-star examples that appeared in my Facebook feed are as follows:

        1. A Facebook friend posted a selfie of himself and his friend at the beach. Caption: “At the
        beach with my favorite [nickname of friend]!!” Hashtag string: “#instagay #gaysf #gaybeach
        #gayfriends #gayboys #gaytwinks #gayabs”

        2. A Facebook friend posted a photo of himself standing next to some graffiti on a wall in an
        alley. Caption: “If you only knew…” Hashtag string: “#instagay #gayla #model #malemodel
        #losangeles #gay #uk #newyork #life #boy”

Notes:

• I commented on the Example 1 photo, “How are half of these hashtags even relevant?” It was the “#gayabs” that did me in.

• Despite the many geographical hashtags, the guy in Example 2 lives and took the photo in Los Angeles.

I perceive these types of hashtag strings as another example of over-marketing. The point of hashtags is to quickly find other posts about similar subjects. So each additional hashtag added (and each completely irrelevant hashtag) looks like a desperate attempt to garner publicity—overcompensation for some deficit somewhere.

Maybe I’m being too harsh. Maybe these boys were bullied for their sexuality growing up and this is a resultant, albeit distorted and probably ineffective, way of attempting to reclaim self-worth. Still, I can’t help but wonder whether this phenomenon also occurs with some straight people, and if so, whether they might be described as “self-absorbed.”