I recently did an experiment with Reddit’s $100 of free advertising credits to promote my SD Card data post on the platform and it drove a fairly decent amount of traffic. The most interesting interaction I got from that post though, was 2 weeks later from a “Richard Garrish” at Everything But Stromboli (or BulkMemoryCards). They’re a family-run seller of SD cards/USB flash memory that was launched in 2006, so it makes sense that they could pop up on an SD card-related post, though I didn’t think their marketing tactic was to blatantly shill for their own products.
Everything But Stromboli’s Questionable Marketing Tactics
As you can see from the screenshot below, they created a new account and posted on both my post and a blatant advert on /r/dashcams and I’m not sure who they were trying to kid? A search of Richard Garrish finds that they’re a “Media and Marketing Associate” at Everything But Stromboli LLC and all of the posts that they’ve published on their blog. Interestingly though they’re not listed on their website’s staff list and there are only 2 connections on LinkedIn. Is it a real person? Was it a terrible experiment gone wrong? I’m not entirely sure, though I did enjoy their final reply (see below) before they deleted their Reddit account after being called out. Nice to see they have some humour in them.
I’m not saying that Everything But Stromboli is a scam operation but you do have to agree that this is a little shady and somewhat surprising. I came across the brand when I was doing research on various brands and if I was in the US, I’d likely have purchased some of their microSD cards to see how they lined up in my testing and get more information on the manufacturers and what was “under the hood”. I’m secretly hoping that this was something an employee came up with on their own and initially thought would be a good idea (albeit terribly executed) and realised their mistake but I do have to wonder what kind of genuine marketer would think this was a good idea.
On a seemingly more positive note, it seems that they are aware that they can have their own company account and are doing all of their advertising there instead. It’s still the same guy but at least they’re not pretending to be their own customers. Sadly though, Reddit didn’t like their advertising methods either and seems to have banned their own subreddit..
(Featured image courtesy of TasteAtlas)
