Play.com’s Tribute To Michael Jackson – Too Soon?
I learnt on Friday that Michael Jackson had passed away when I opened an email from Play.com entitled: Play.com’s Tribute to Michael Jackson.
The email was an affiliate email along with some banners and an affiliate link with my ID inserted into it all ready for me to put up on a site. At the time I didn’t think much about it other than “Michael Jackson’s dead?” and headed off to the news sites to find out more.
Today though as I’m going through my email inbox, I come across the email again and look at it in a bit more detail. The banners play.com have provided simply say “Michael Jackson 1958 – 2009″, infact here ya go you can have a look yourself:
It really leads me to the question, was this too soon?
Within 24 hours of the news Play.com (and many, many, many other merchants for that fact) we’re looking to profiteer from the mans death and encouraging their affiliate partners to become a part of it with ready made creatives .
Now I see both sides of this. From a commercial point of view there’s money to be made and Michael Jackson isn’t sitting at the top of the album charts due to lack of consumer demand, so all Play.com were doing was fulfilling this demand. Infact In Apple’s iTunes download charts, Jackson albums are topping the chart in 13 different countries including the UK, where his albums took all of the top six places with Number Ones at No 1.
But why does the email I received from Play.com make me feel so uneasy then?
