Dom finally gets into blogging and was the first to post on Abderdeen's purchase by Harte-Hanks -a direct-marketing and customer database company. Yes, those guys filling your mail boxes with the entire contents of a forest and calling you about cruises in Caribbean Sea during TV prime time.
Dom says it gives AberdeenGroup a new lease of life. Their business model is actually pretty much staying the same: Aberdeen was an analyst for hire and they're now a marketing company. At least it's now clear what they stand for. Some of the respondents of this survey thought they were on the rise. They're now officially wrong.
ARmadgeddon's take: vendors wishing to spend time briefing Aberdeen should be very careful with potential conflicts of interests. Since Aberdeen can no more claim being independent, they ought to probe how the information will be used and who comissionned the study. Vendors commissionning white papers should be wary of their fast decreasing reputation.
By the way, on the other end of the spectrum, Redmonk was awarded the 2006 Tekrati Analyst Transparency -at least according to James McGovern (who, despite all appearances, is not related to James Governor) since we could not find a confirmation on Tekrati.
Dom's post is here: AberdeenGroup given a new lease of life? [ARcade]
The press release here on HH's web site: News Releases: Harte-Hanks.com
Thursday 21 September 2006
Aberdeen is finally recategorised
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8 comments:
Glad to see the back of them! Stuffing direct mail would be a better use of their 'analyst' time...
Hope the rest of the analysts for hire go down the pan too....F&S, Butler etc
Hey whats the chances Duncan will post something here telling us we are all wrong, and they were really a very nice firm???? :-)
Reports of Aberdeen's death are premature. Nothing suggests that Aberdeen will close as a brand or turn into a direct mail company. Where on earth do you get this stuff from? Lighthouse has no special feelings for Aberdeen, but we not that their business model has changed; see http://analystrelations.blogspot.com/2006/02/research-suggests-karma-beats.html. It's not our opinion that Aderdeen is rising in influence: that is the finding of a massive international survey; see http://analystrelations.blogspot.com/2006/06/vendors-name-rising-analysts-forrester.html. Unlike others, we don't make this stuff up.
"Aderdeen"? Is that your typing? Considering their reputation as the advertorial analysts, perhaps that should be their new name.
Yes, AD-berdeen. You pay, they write white papers, er, AD-vertorials.
Duncan, frankly they have a reputation for dollar-addiction, not for independence.
The legendary 'analysts' in the boom who would try to blackmail us into buying 'reports' - 'reports' we could (if we wanted) basically write ourselves are still working there!
Duncan, give us all a break - when you sink that low ethically, you don't rise back to the top...
They do all real analyst firms a disservice. And when PR firms like yours try to tell buyers differently you end up covered in the same s##t. Enjoy the smell.
Give old aberdeen a break... they actually used to claim they did "marketing assistance services", so yes, they were coin-operated, but they never claimed to be anything but. Then I see whoring like this:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/b/c/1/bc15f052-f970-405f-b691-5d0052410b42/203326Euro.pdf
it's companies like IDC who are the real violators of being "pay-for-play" because they claim to be independent, but then take it up the a*s from the highest bidder....
Aberdeen might be the perennial analyst whore, but at least they never claimed to be anythng different AND they actually have some decent analysts - just a poor business model (and that pr*ck kastner). not to mention that fool bedard who's taking aberdeen right where he took benchmarking partners....
You're right about IDC, atually we wrote about them, META, Yankee and Aberdeen in this post:
Yankee, analyst impartiality and circular references [ARmadgeddon]
The issue we have is that they give the whole industry a bad name. There's nothing wrong with a good positioning paper, stating why a product/solution might be a good choice within certain parameters.
Making a TCO study from 5 customer cases or "validating" a benchmark (see response to Bitter Andy in this post: Borg for hire?) is definitively something else.
Probably the worst AR professionals are confronted with is the "if you bought reprints, you probably would get better coverage", which is no better than the Borg tactics of restricting access (limiting briefings to 30 mn, insisting to have only paid subscribers to enquiries, trying to flog more SAS days as briefings) which also equates to pay for play.
Its not the AR or Vendors that Aberdeen con, its end users/buyers. It's a dishonest and corrupt business model.
And those that support Aberdeen clearly have ethical issues themselves.....
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