fitzroyalty

I give up. The Australian Grand Prix Corporation are morons. They have finally publicised their replacement for GP Traction, called Sidetracked, but unless you’re dedicated you’d never know about it or be able to find out about it. Information is buried, the offer (what you get for your money) is unclear and I think it is the wrong product marketed to the wrong audience.

The stupidity of their invisible marketing is enormous:

• Sidetracked is an existing brand name and web domain of a go-carting and leisure complex business (when googling a business or product it’s essential to have a unique and easy to find name) – marketing failure
• Sidetracked is not mentioned on the GrandPrix.com.au hompage – marketing failure
• Sidetracked is not mentioned on the grand prix website tickets page – marketing failure
• It is finally mentioned at bottom of the Ticketek grand prix tickets page – marketing failure
• The offer is not explained clearly – marketing failure

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I’ve refused requests to advertise on my blog to date, and have not incorporated google ads or adsense because I want to respect my audience. Anything that I publish must provide a relevant valuable service. To this end I have been looking at services that aggregate restaurant details. A hyperlocal site like mine would benefit from providing a dynamic listing of local places to eat along with their contact details.

So far I’ve looked at three services and all have failed the hyperlocal test. The menulog people want me to run generic banner ads because they have not yet implemented an API that would allow me to pull in a dynamic rich content feed of their data showing pics and text of restaurants only in Fitzroy. No thanks. Do you understand what ‘local’ means?

The webmenus site is dumb and says nothing about the purpose of the site or why anyone should use it. While their search is good, they have no content, and so they offer nothing useful to the visitor. They fail the useability test. Also, their blog does not list the date posts have been published, which for me is very useful information.

Finally, foodgod’s search is stupid or their data is deficient because they only list 7 places for ‘Fitzroy’ and some of those are in St Kilda (because of Fitzroy St). And their UI is ugly. Weakest link etc…

None of these sites has the needs and wants of their supposed users central to their construction or business models. I suspect all are doomed to fail.

In the premises formerly occupied by the sadly departed Charmaine’s Icecream (the chilli chocolate was amazing!) is a new business, Juanita’s. At least, that is what the window promises. I’ll try them out very soon. In the meantime, welcome to Fitzroy!

By the time I got to photograph this piece it had been attacked, but in a way this only adds to its value.