Will you blog for food?

Apr 28, 2009 by Dirk Singer

If I give you £15 ($22) worth of free food will you cover me on your website (with link back of course)? That’s the assumption a take away food portal has made according to this story in the Blog Herald. A story I had to read twice to make sure it was for real.

Basically, just-eat-co.uk, is offering bloggers a free meal to write about their service.

According to the company’s marketing manager: “As an online business, we’re keen to reward the bloggers and online gurus who share our enthusiasm for a great takeaway and see the site redesign as a perfect opportunity to do so.”

I can see the cogs turning on this one…bloggers’ enthusiasm for takeaway meals….I mean, as we all know, they all sit in dingy basements and don’t get out much, right?

And then as, the Blog Herald claims, “most bloggers won’t turn down free stuff”. You know, being hard up and all that.

I’m sure most bloggers do like takeaways. Just as they also like food from restaurants and supermarkets. Much like the general public really.

And on the subject of freebies, I can think of plenty of bloggers who take offence at even a sniff of ‘free stuff.’

Why didn’t this company just give away vouchers as a good will gesture and leave it up to bloggers to decide what they will do with it? Almost guaranteed, they would have got more out of it.

I usually steer clear of calling out other marketing campaigns, but this is an exception.

That’s because it just seems pretty wide off the mark and a good example of what brands shouldn’t be doing online. If you pulled this kind of stunt on offline consumer magazines, any writer would give you short shrift. Why should online writers be any different?

Image – El Patojo