Advertising Age article attacks Vegemite’s link policy
One of America’s biggest advertising & media publications has published an article by Abbey Klaassen that has attacked an Aussie icon, saying “here’s one for the annals of marketer stupidity.”
So what has infuriated Abbey?
Image from Ross Mayfield
Well, it’s the following Vegemite privacy policy statement found on its website.
“no part of this Site may be reproduced on any other internet site, and you are not authorised to redistribute or sell the material or to reverse engineer, disassemble, or otherwise convert it to any other form that people can use. You are also prohibited from linking the Site to another website in any way whatsoever.”
“Kraft’s Vegemite site has perhaps one of the most backward privacy policies known to man and marketer “ writes Abbey.
Vegemite’s no link policy also incensed Cory Doctorow who posted an article on the website boingboing, titled ‘Vegemite’s stupid and clueless linking policy.’
Cory said of the policy “This is like saying “You are prohibited from giving people directions to the Kraft factory.”
It doesn’t stop there. On the blog Tetherd Cow Ahead, the blogger Reverend Anaglyph writes “NO-ONE in this early part of the 21st century makes a website that you are not allowed to link to and protects it with a legal rider! That’s the internet equivalent of building your retail outlet in Upper Siberia and then posting security guards with tasers at the front door just in case anyone does find you.”
To be frank, it’s a silly policy that can’t be enforced and defeats the whole idea of marketing online. I suspect Kraft’s legal team made more money from composing the privacy policy than the actual cost of building their website.
Here’s my link to Vegemite.
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September 14th, 2009 at 8:39 am
It’s been pointed out that the intention of the Legal guff is probably to restrict people from linking from within the contributor sections of the site to other sites, but for a legal document it’s not exactly what we’d call accurate language – mostly everyone who’s read it has interpreted it the way I did.
And in any case, some parts of the site demonstrate a high level of net dumbness – for instance, if you want to merely read about Kraft’s ‘new’ Vegemite product, ‘No Name’, you are forced to agree (by way of an irritating and cumbersome Flash scroller) to the privacy policy by – I can’t recall ever having to ‘agree’ to conditions before entering a commercial site.