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SPARC seem to get a hard time. But they are busily beavering away with a range of initiatives which are creative, if nothing else. For example, with the Mission On website they are trying to take on the likes of Bebo in the hope that kids and teens who play games & chat to their mates via computer, are going to visit their site. And then, go out and play sport. Over at Stuff, Bernard Hickey lifted the lid on this site, as well as pointing out the fact that SPARC is being run in a more extravagant way than the Reserve Bank. All valid points of course, but Mr. Hickey seems to miss the point that the Reserve Bank is all about boring stuff like making sure the economy remains functioning and trading banks stay liquid. In contrast, SPARC is all about missions and looking cool. Never mind the NZ$45 per single page impression, (a world record?), the point is that page looks good. The software company behind all this knows all about looking good, and their renowned self-promotion will hopefully rub off on the site itself. We are not quite so sure about that robot – milk bottle thing though. How much did that cost?
Now we’d like to make it known that our outrage at this profligacy is not related to the failed job application at SPARC from our own Quentin Tanqueray-Nibbles a couple of years ago. Although, re-reading his job application we are more convinced than ever that he would have been ideal. We just feel that there is room for improvement, and that we are well placed to assist. So we have taken it upon ourselves to write to SPARC with this open letter. Dear Mr. Miskimmin and the other General Managers, We note from various news sources that you have spent in between $3.5m and $10m on your “Mission-on” website, depending on which accounting system is used. Yet it appears that you have between 30 and 50% of the daily visitors that we get for our NZ No. 8 wire site that is nowhere near as pretty as yours. No we really like fancy websites with computer games on them, so we really think it’s only fair that we help out, in order to get your message out to more people in New Zealand. So why don’t we exchange reciprocal links? We find a lot of our visitors come from these, so you should find it worthwhile in order to lift your traffic figures drastically. Please suggest a description; 40 characters max so no wasting of resources there please, that you would like used next to the name of your site. This will be particularly useful in your case because the title of your site could potentially confuse those not au fait with meaningless corporate bingo. But wait there’s more, and you may want to sit down for this. We are offering this service for free. No seriously, we won’t charge you a cent. We realise you probably think we are joking, and another one of those annoying IT bills is about to land in your P.O. Box, but we are deadly serious here. We hope you can find time in your busy schedule to reply to this offer of assistance. Regards www.sportsfreak.co.nz We sent this offer of assistance yesterday, but are still waiting to hear back from them. We understand this though; they are probably scheduling a brainstorming thought shower to determine the most appropriate 40 character site description. So all is not lost. No doubt the annual IT bills will increase; there is talk of more interactive software; and then of course this also needs to be maintained. There is also that niche demographic to track down, but hopefully we can provide that foot in the door. Who knows, they might one day feature on the Alexa.com impression list, and that will really impress Mr. Hickey. In the meantime, we will keep our visitors posted on this. For free. Sportsfreak Concerned (non-corporate) citizen.
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