Today’s lesson: make sure the folks in Marketing and Operations are talking to each other.

This ad was on the front page of today’s Sunday Oregonian:

As an ad professional, they had me at “$15 off plus free delivery”.

A nice, simple offer. Strong call to action, with a reward for taking it. Although the print on the deadline is way too small — they would have been better off making the deadline font every bit as big as the rest of the copy — but there is a deadline.

As a person who consumes groceries, I was interested, so I went directly to my computer and logged onto their web site. This is what I found:

We are sorry for the inconvenience, but our site is currently down for maintenance from 9 PM until 7 AM (PDT).

It was 8:35am. In an effort to take care of delivery customers, there was a link, but it went to this:

Our home delivery system is temporarily unavailable due to a scheduled system maintenance. Thank you for your patience.

While the folks in Advertising were arranging to spend thousands of dollars to invite new customers to their web site, somebody in IT was scheduling a maintenance activity that took the site down. And if they figured that the maintenance would be over by the time most Oregonian readers were up and reading the paper, they figured wrong.

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