Herschell Gordon Lewis says there are marketers who sour the grapes others have nurtured. 

Sophisticates know ‘The Little Foxes’ as a stage play and subsequent movie based on the script by Lillian Hellman. Although on occasion small theatre companies still produce the play, the plotline is usually lost in history, because both play and movie date back about 70 years.

Reserved for us intellectuals is the basis for the phrase – Chapter 2, Verse 15 of the Song of Solomon in the King James Version of the Bible: ‘Take us the foxes, the little foxes that spoil the vines, for our vines have tender grapes.’

What does that have to do with copy that sells, more than 70 years after the play and half a millennium after King James? Sadly, corruption on the World Wide Web has resulted in wild breeding of greedy little foxes that spoil our marketing vines, giving us not tender grapes but sour grapes.

Disgustingly consistent

The history of commerce is disgustingly consistent: A medium becomes dominant. Charlatans flood in. Public enthusiasm morphs into public scepticism. The good guys are swept up in the clouds of doubt.

In our savage little world, wordsmiths grunt and heave, exacting every gram of potential benefit from the factual core, extruding (or, in too many cases, excreting) sales messages that either present speculation as fact or, worse, sales messages that conceal the underside of a two-sided factual core.

Even the most die-hard old-timers no longer argue the point: buying online has some major advantages. A big advantage is that comparison shopping is easy. In less than a minute, anybody can check prices at three or four competing sources without travelling even one foot outside our front doors. We don’t have to dress up, we don’t have to use petrol and we don’t have to wait for a clerk to finish dealing with another customer or prospect.

Before the Internet, major marketers such as Amazon didn’t even exist. Now, they’re dominant. Many online customers not only don’t know where these vendors are located but don’t care. So dealing online is the only way to go, right? Wrong. For every Amazon, there seem to be a hundred phonies.

Dollars, euros, pounds. Oh my!

Wow! Here’s an email offering a ‘Swiss’ watch for one US dollar. Too good to be true? You bet your bippy it is. Shipping is US$3.99, but that isn’t an issue. What is an issue is a hidden notice that says you automatically are signing up for a weird deal sending you a watch every month, with US$88.98 charged to your credit card. If you don’t accept that deal, you have to return the watch. So much for the $1 bargain.

Based on the legitimacy bestowed by eBay, bidding is an increasingly employed – and increasingly dangerous – way to buy something. A huge batch of eBay followers exploit the technique, including the inevitable phonies.

For example, here’s what apparently is a UK marketer, ‘Bidfun.com’, with a heavy US presence. Buy, through your charge card, as many ‘credits’ as you think you may need. Then you use those credits to bid on auctioned items – computers or electronics or TV sets or video games.

OK, we have US$100 in credits. Just to bid costs us one credit. So we bid, and with only one minute to go, we’re the high bidder. Hot dog! Uhhh . . . no, dirty dog, because we now see a hidden ‘Gotcha’: Every bid extends the deadline by 20 seconds . . . but allows just one penny increase above the previous high bidder. So with five seconds left, in come another batch of bids and suddenly, instead of one minute to go, it’s four or five minutes to go, about six pence higher. We count down, then bid again.

Oops. We’re out another dollar, because at the two-second mark another bidder drives the deadline up again. So it’s possible to use $50 of our $100 and wind up with nothing, which is what the site’s intention is.

Oh, yeah, Barnum was right. There’s a sucker born every minute and the Web is fertile territory for 21st century Barnums.

We’ve all heard, many times: When a deal seems to be too good to be true, it probably is.

Herschell Gordon Lewis is the principal of Lewis Enterprises, Pompano Beach, Florida, through which he is available as copywriter, consultant and speaker. Mr Lewis’ latest book is his 31st. Phone him: +1 954 782 1750, or visit his website: www.herschellgordonlewis.com