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Signs of life in surreality
| By Greg Fisher
File this under: "We need a social media presence, JB!"
TransUnion, the consumer reporting agency that compiles and maintains files on consumers on a nationwide basis, regularly engages in the practice of assembling or evaluating, and maintaining, for the purpose of furnishing consumer reports to third parties bearing on a consumer's credit worthiness, credit standing, or credit capacity.
At least, we hope it does. In other words, it is one big credit bureau-- one of the Big Three in a troika that is the U.S. consumer reporting oligopoly. If you want credit, you're probably going to have to deal with these behemoths. Try as they might, their efforts to take the edge off of the specter of their ubiquitousness in common American life fails. They even fail at stating simple fact.
Equifax associates itself with big-time sports, engages in some bizarre and very ironic Hollywood product placement, and Experian does funny commercials.
TransUnion's hip marketing department tried the metaphysics motif (incidentally, there is no such thing as credit karma) with a play on the word zendo. They respelled it zendough, as in the zen – of your dough.
Oh, buh-rother.
Merely maintaining 200-million consumer files in the world's largest economy must be unfulfilling, because the Big Three all want to sell things—based on the files consumers themselves help create—back to consumers. Another brilliant TransUnion sales idea was to buy truecredit.com. There, you could find the cute, comic-strip face of "Audrey O'Dell." You could even Ask Audrey (like you could Ask Max at Experian (but with alliteration)).
That was over a decade ago. But, the image of Audrey is still around (Max retired), and she is just as friendly and, now, hipper than ever.
She Tweets!
Hashtag OMG is right. See her in the line-drawn flesh right here: twitter.com/TransUnion/status/52...
And, oh boy - oh, boy - oh boy, it's serious: She has the Blue Badge of Identity! You know you're really talking to a real person—at a real, confirmed, certified and identified company—sitting in a real cubicle.
So, you engage the company with whom you are mutually, and practically inextricably tied. You Ask Audrey. And here (in its monosyllabic splendor) is what you get:
See Myth 8. See TransUnion's unfortunate statement associated with with Myth 8. See more on TransUnion. And more.
Social media marketing. You probably think that anybody can do it. You probably think that you can do it.
Not so fast, Skippie. It's a man's world, too, so get serious.