…do it well, for pete’s sake!
The accused: National Instruments.
The evidence: An ad with a crossword puzzle in Lab Equipment Magazine and on LE’s website.
The accolade: Great idea to draw in readers with a puzzle with technical questions.
The crime: Making the questions center too closely about NI.
The argument: Okay, it’s their ad, they have a right to talk about the products and brands. Out of 19 crossword questions, roughly half relate to their products or brand. Two are actually hot-linked to answers about their products. But what bugs me are clues like these:
7. National Instruments CEO nickname
9. Inventor of LabVIEW
I was familiar enough with their company to answer the question about what city they are headquartered in, but these two especially smack of ‘inside baseball’. I understand that they were trying to mix-up the clues so they weren’t all technical or promotional, but how about some fun questions?
Besides, they are marketing to the Dilberts of the world. And you know how much Dilbert cares about CEOs. (Perhaps there was some suck-up going on?)
The sentence: Eat your investment in this issue. Study what GlobalSpec had to say about marketing with games to engineers. Then re-run the crossword (looks like it will be a series anyway), but think harder about the puzzle clues. The devil is in the details.