You probably haven’t run across this list of the world’s best toilet views yet. Now you have.

I received an email the other day from the Web Marketing Association with the subject line, “WebAward Judges pick Obama over McCain.”

Given yesterday’s post about AdAge choosing Barack Obama as Marketer of the Year, I was interested to see what the WMA said about the Obama and McCain Web sites.

Here’s the first paragraph of the email (bold emphasis mine):

In April, the Web Marketing Association had our WebAward judges review both Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s Website in a head to head challange. Senitor Obama’s Website won the challange and he went on to win the Democratic nomination (I’m not saying it was because of us, but you have to wonder…)

Oh, and here’s a sentence from the second paragraph:

This month we asked the WebAward Judges to compaire Senitor John McCain’s Website with that of Senitor Obama’s.

Egads. The average piece of spam I receive has fewer misspellings and grammatical errors.

According to the WMA Web site, the organization was founded “to help set a high standard for Internet marketing and web development. Staffed by volunteers, this organization is made up of marketing, advertising, public relations and web design professionals from around the world who share a passion for improving the quality of advertising, marketing and web site development on the Internet today and in the future.”

One of the categories in which the Obama and McCain sites were judged was copywriting. According to the WMA email, “Neither Websites have any of the editing issues some large organizations can experience.”

Too bad the same can’t be said about the WMA.

Takeaway for marketers: If your marketing communications are written in a such a way that they’d be lucky to receive a C- from a middle school English teacher, don’t expect them to do anything more than make your business or organization look stupid.

AdAge Marketer of the Year, that is.

If you’ve been wondering about the terrific music in that snazzy Doubletree commercial above, wonder no more: It’s Dinah Washington.

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”
—Dale Carnegie