Truth be told, advertisers never met a bandwagon they didn’t like. Enter the first Mobile Tuesday, an extension, of course, of Black Friday and recently created Cyber Monday. If you’re one of 18,000 who signed up via Black Friday leak sites, you should be receiving promotional offers from McDonald’s, Finish Line, and RedTag.
First reaction is that it seems kind of off-putting and copy-cattish, but what Mobigosee—the marketing firm behind the new campaign—is doing makes more intuitive sense the more one thinks about it. The recuperation from Thanksgiving weekend indulgence and all those great deals turning into virtual pumpkins at midnight on Monday leave retailer establishments sweeping tumbleweeds from the aisles.
Nobody’s shopping on the day after Cyber Monday, which was created because nobody was shopping on the Monday after Black Friday. And with the now-admitted recession in full swing, the economy needs people shopping.* Our prediction: This Mobile Tuesday thing will hit the press and spread enough so that everybody’s expecting it by 2009’s shopping season, more retailers and more subscribers.
One has to wonder when it ends, of course. Surely, if we truly believe every diem should be carpe’d (sorry, didn’t take Latin) and that bandwagons are marketers’ best friends, then why stop at Mobile Tuesday? Don’t we want every day until Christmas to be like the week before Christmas, with mad rushes and Wal-Mart style tramplings?
Yeah, suppose that’s something to think about. How about Wireless Wednesday for hot deals on mobile gadgets, Tricked Out Thursday for auto accessories, Blue Saturday for adult novelties, and Lazy Sunday, starting at noon for sleepy-head couch potatoes needing new recliners and mattresses?
Heck, everyday can be Christmas for marketers if they just get organized and start directing the bargain-hungry masses where to go on specific days. At least then the iconoclasts among us would know which parts of town to avoid on those days, except on Clove Cigarette and Absinthe Friday, right?
*However, it is interesting in a backward kind of way that in the midst of debt-wracked and credit-crunched instability, people that need money most are encouraged to take on more debt and credit crunch instead of saving and/or reallocating the money they have on hand—but that’s another issue, reserved societies not built on faith in continuous, fluid capitalism, where wealth trickles down in a more cautious manner than it trickles up.