Web will eat itself

Flowersdirect.com has put itself up for sale on QXL.com. The managers of the online flower stall reckon this is the best way of finding the funds needed to survive. They optimistically expect to receive bids in excess of £1m, although the reserve has been set at a more modest £750,000.

So if you've got a spare (and rather large) pile of cash lying around, you know where to go.

In the process, you'll be helping out QXL itself. Things aren't exactly rosy for them either. The company famously joined the 99 per cent club - for companies whose shares are worth just one per cent of their post-IPO peak.

Shame QXL is listed. If it wasn't and it found its fortunes withering even further, it could take a leaf out of Flowersdirect.com's book and sell itself on its own website.

(For a recent interview with the CFO of QXL, see http://www.silicon.com/a43126 )

In vaguely related news, the makers of the Harry Potter movie have also gone all self-referential and quite possibly post post-modern by advertising the fact that you can see adverts for the multi-million pound film.

Confused? Warner Bros, which is behind the movie, is spending money on offline ads in the States which encourage people to go online to see a trailer for the film.

Warner Bros won't say exactly how many impressions the trailer has received so far, but a spokesman told us it's already well into the millions.

Warner must be well-pleased at the success of what is probably being called an integrated marketing campaign. The Round-Up, on the other hand, is slightly bemused.

But then it didn't get excited when what seemed like the whole universe kept telling it where to download trailers of the Phantom Menace, so maybe it's not the best judge of these things.

If you must, see http://www.warnerbros.com/pages/main/home.jsp

Another form of advertising we don't understand is the corporate anthem. We're not talking jingles or ad soundtracks here, but the rabble-rousing, feel-good motivational songs employees are probably encouraged to bellow during team-building away-days.

Thanks to the fine work of a gentlemen called Chris Raettig (and a little help from our friends at NTK) there are a whole host of these available online for your delectation.

And they vary between the pant-wettingly funny and the stomach-churningly awful. Mainly the latter.

Mr Raettig reckons KPMG's song is the sorriest of a very sorry bunch. The lyrics on their own don't give the full nauseating flavour of the piece, but you'll get some idea of just how bad it is from this snippet:

"KPMG, we're as strong as can be,
A team of power and energy.
We go for the goal
Together we hold
Onto a vision of global strategy."

Is it possible to hold onto a vision? Anyway, please do log on to http://www.corporateanthems.raettig.org to hear the whole thing. There's a particularly horrid key change about 3:20 into the song, so stay with it. Have a sick bag at the ready though.

(Please do try to stagger the times you all log-on though: the last time we mentioned a slightly bizarre website, namely surpriseyourwoman.com, it crashed under the extra traffic you lovely folk generated. So Chris: sorry in advance if this happens again).

It's very easy for people working in this industry to take the knowledge of Joe and Joanne Public for granted. Sure, we do realise that, despite all the column inches devoted to online porn, most people in Acacia Avenue know there's more to net life than that. But we assume that everyone knows what a search engine is. We assume that, as we stride purposefully across our cosy, jargon-strewn landscape, even mere mortals have heard of Amazon.

My usual litmus for this kind of thing - my mum - certainly has. (Those of you who remember my mum's first mention in this column about two and a half years ago may like to know she's very well. In fact, she's even bought a computer now and is surfing the net very cautiously in case she 'breaks' someone's website.)

But not everyone is so clued up. Research conducted by BT recently revealed that some people couldn't distinguish between a search engine and an ISP. One participant in BT's exercise, which involved them filming ten families using the net, bought some books from Amazon.com but couldn't recall Amazon's name when later asked about her purchase. So much for branding.

Most of the people surveyed were suspicious of buying things online. One participant backed out of a transaction altogether because she had to enter a figure in GBP and didn't know what that meant. That'll be lost revenue for the airline concerned then.

It's time to drop the jargon and make websites truly user friendly. Otherwise Mr and Mrs J Public (and my mum) will remain very much attached to the high street.

Unless, of course, we can somehow make Sir Cliff Richard an integral part of the internet. The most pointless research we've ever seen has revealed that the Peter Pan of Pop is the figure most people would trust with their passwords.

Sir Cliff polled 34 per cent of the vote, beating the ubiquitous Carol Vorderman into second place (22 per cent). Tony Blair got 17 per cent; Anne Widdicombe somehow managed 10 per cent, trouncing 'talented' Catherine Zeta Jones and 'smiley' Carol Smilie in the process. And she can't even be trusted to get a decent haircut.

We've got absolutely no idea what this research proves. But we can tell you it was conducted by Corillian International - although even they aren't quite sure why they bothered. Its MD said: "As consumers increasingly turn to the internet to purchase goods, manage their finances and gather information, British society will become password driven. We were interested to know which public figures would be most trusted by the public but, in reality, people should not give their internet passwords to anybody."

Here endeth Cliff's budding career as a trusted third party.

So all this guff was about getting publicity for Corillian then. Which we've just given them. Damn.

The ashamed Round-Up is off to listen to the KPMG anthem one more time. It is, after all, the new media equivalent of self-flagellation.

Nevertheless, we'll be back next Friday.