For the record, I don’t have a blender fetish.

Or even a blender, for that matter.

But amazon.com thinks I do.

Why else would they be sending me so many blender-centric emails every week?

Maybe it’s because I used amazon when I bought my wife a blender for Christmas.

I get lots of emails from amazon – too many, really.

But I haven’t unsubscribed from their mailing list – yet – because usually said emails are useful, keeping me in the loop with new music releases or books related to any of my many non-blender fetishes.

And that makes sense.

Somebody who has bought music by a given artist probably wants to buy more; somebody who has bought a book about a given subject would probably like to read another.

But blenders? How many freaking blenders does one person need?

Especially just two weeks after buying one in the first place?

The problem is automation.

Digital media can be very powerful; email in particular.

Indeed, dallasmodelworks.com does most of its marketing through opt-in email.

It is direct, it is customized, it is inexpensive and it is very effective.

And it is all carefully monitored – by humans.

Don’t trust the fire-and-forget digerati who will tell you that they can automate your marketing.

The simple fact is, it still takes humans to connect with humans.

Just like those idiotic Google AdSense algorithms that put howling inappropriate ads in all the wrong places, clearly no one at amazon.com is paying close enough attention to what their automated emailing protocols are doing.

No humans are involved.

And because of it, amazon is on the verge of losing a real live paying human customer.

Put that in your blender and smoke it.

- Craig Cooper