Fun With Sponsors

Jesus, these Swiffer pads have got me higher than a motherfucker!

Last year when Dogs on Drugs was nominated for a Bloggie (I believe the category was Most Likely To Be Authored By Someone With A Bunch Of Bodies In His Crawl Space), I started receiving offers to write “sponsored posts”, which is industry speak for “become a giant tool for thirty bucks”. Seriously. I don’t mind when people review products or whatever, but I was specifically being asked to do so without letting my readers know what was going on. And they’d give me thirty bucks for my time. Needless to say, I wasn’t down with the idea and said so although kind of indirectly. (The result was the infamous “Corn Pops are not made of packing peanuts and speed” post, which still makes me laugh when I read it.)

So I was wondering if this year’s nomination (which is till open for voting, ahem) would result in a similar offer. It did.

From: Nathan (redacted)
Subject: Greg – Site Partnership Inquiry
Date: March 6th, 2013 4:44 PM
To: Greg (greg@dogsondrugs.com)

Hello Greg,

I’m Nathan (name redacted) with (company name redacted), and I would like to ask if you accept advertising on DogsonDrugs.com. If you would be interested in writing a sponsored post, reviewing a product, or including a text link inside one of your existing posts, please let me know. (Company name redacted) sells all types of promotional materials from business cards to car magnets, and all of them are fully customizable. If you’d like to know more about the company, feel free to visit (link redacted).

Thank you,

Nathan (redacted)
Marketing Associate

Well, Nathan certainly was polite, so I let him off the hook rather easily.

From: Greg
Subject: Re: Can I catch herpes from a sheep?
Date: March 6th, 2013 9:19 PM
To: Nathan (redacted)

Hi Nathan,

It’s probably best if I don’t get involved in sponsored postings again. The last time ended in disaster. I was told to work in the sponsor “organically”, but that’s virtually impossible given what I normally write about. So I just wound up a 4,000 word post about felching with the sentence “Anyway, go buy a bunch of fucking Johnson & Johnson baby wipes.” Needless to say, Johnson & Johnson was NOT pleased, but how else was I going to write that in “organically”?

So some lawyer asshole came after me, and he didn’t back off until I burned a death threat in his front lawn with a gallon of gasoline. You can’t mess around with these legal types, that’s been my experience. You go full-bore crazy from the start, and if you do it right the very idea that you might break all of his ribs with a ball peen hammer is usually enough to get him to See The Light.

As for product reviews, I’ve had similar negative experiences, even when my review was quite enthusiastic: “I just got done smoking a bunch of Swiffer pads, and they got me REALLY HIGH!” I just can’t figure some people.

I am, however, very interested in some of your company’s products, specifically the rear window graphics you put on cars. Yours look very professional, if your web site is to be believed. Do you do the job in a shop, or will you do one “on-site”? The reason I ask is because my mother-in-law is getting a new car, and I’d like you to go to her house and put a rear window graphic on her car that reads, “I am a crazy fucking cunt”. How much would that cost?

Greg
Kennel Master,
Dogs on Drugs
http://dogsondrugs.com