Desperate Marketing Morons - Sears Edition

As much as I hate to admit it, I was poking around Yahoo Answers today. They run a whole bunch of advertisements on the site that most people totally ignore. In fact, I'm sure if you asked 100 people - 99 of them wouldn't even know there are ads there - much less what any of them might say.

Well I happened to notice one that is just about the lamest, desperate attempt at marketing that I have ever seen. It's for Craftsman Tools, which is the in-house brand for Sears.

It starts with some animation in which people's faces appear. One guy has something odd on his nose and another is of a woman with a couple of red devil horns. It ends up with the ad on the right called "Share a Scare." It offers you the opportunity to "customize your very own Craftsman Halloween character to email friends and family." HUH?

Let's go back to the advertising boardroom at Sears for a moment. Someone has an idea. We'll let people upload a picture of someone's face and put in onto a body made up of Craftsman tools. We'll make it really, really spooky and then let them email the finished creature to everyone in the world! Of course this will make them want to run out immediately and buy a whole bunch of Craftsman tools.

Someone actually approved this idea and then authorized spending a lot of money to make it happen. Of course it self destructs on October 31st, but more importantly, how in the world is this going to help sell tools? Are the kids who might (highly unlikely) find this appealing in their demographic of quality tool buyers and users?

Good grief! This is not only a lame idea in and of itself, but it is so off the mark that it should have been laughed out of existence instead of actually seeing the light of day. I can only assume the marketers at Sears and the Craftsman division are so desperate that they are willing to try anything.

I'd be real interested to see how many people actually went to the site and spent the time to construct a "Craftsman character" to email to family and friends. If there are more than 10 I'd be very surprised. So sad. Just so you know, this is the what the really cool finished product looks like. It even speaks and says, "There's a little Craftsman in all of us." Impressed?