EDITORIAL: Grab Your Umbrella And Air Freshener: Data Network Affiliates’ Vomit Spigot Wide Open And Raining Down On World Of MLM
OK, seriously now . . .
Not a day goes by when the PP Blog does not read complaints from MLMers that the critics misunderstand the business, fracture the facts and don’t take the industry seriously. Why would anybody take the industry seriously when people who purport to be MLM experts are either cheerleading for companies such as DNA or making excuses for them?
DNA’s hype is a train wreck. Period. It represents precisely what’s wrong with the MLM industry.
It is said that people routinely laugh when shown videos of tobacco executives declaring in the 1990s that nicotine is not addictive. The claims are striking — and funny — even today, years after they were uttered.
Observing MLM purveyors often is like observing the tobacco executives of the 1990s. The industry has virtually no PR savvy, and its participants often come off as lemmings and cultists. If you are promoting DNA or otherwise making excuses for it or blaming other people for its inability to deliver “free” phones and “unlimited” cell-phone service for $10 a month, you are a fool. Period.
What has happened at DNA is the responsibility of DNA. That claims purportedly made by another person about his capacity to deliver both the phones and the service may have a role in the company’s inability to deliver does not change the fact that DNA advertised free phones and unlimited service for $10 a month — and it did so before it verified both capacity to deliver and pricing.
If it weren’t so bizarre, it would be laugh-out-loud funny: DNA’s own version of the preposterous claims made by the tobacco executives of the late 20th Century.
Everything about DNA is absurd. From the claims that its purported license-plate data program could help the AMBER Alert program, to its claims that AMBER Alert had an “astronomical” budget and had saved “ONLY” 492 children, to its claims that it had morphed overnight into a cell-phone company and slayed every competitor on earth — it’s all absurd.
Here is one way to look at DNA: It poached its absurd license-plate data-collection program from Narc That Car’s equally absurd program because it knew the pitch was “working” for Narc. When DNA discovered serious people were asking serious questions about Narc, it discovered that it had a need to distance itself from the “new” license-plate data collection business.
Why? Because after poaching Narc’s message, DNA discovered it was in a potential privacy and legal quagmire. DNA suddenly began to downplay the license-plate business. Instead of bashing AMBER Alert and trying to persuade conference-call listeners that AMBER Alert had a bloated budget and had managed to save “ONLY” hundreds of abducted children, it then repositioned itself as a polite, potentially helpful partner of AMBER Alert and the U.S. government — all from its domain name registered behind a proxy in the Cayman Islands.
