Thank you for your comment! If Google thinks I'm interested in Grammarly, it is sadly mistaken. Maybe in the not-so-distant future, business professors will use Grammarly as one of their cases of how not to run an advertising campaign, unless the goal is to look desperate and faintly ridiculous. When I read through some of my students' essays, it looks like quite a few SMU students don't yet know they can have access to a watered-down version for free. Frankly, they'd be better off using some of the money they spend on such intense advertising to give some students access to the full version of Grammarly and encourage them to tell their friends. Why don't companies realize it makes them look desperate when they inundate the market with the very same ads? It just signals they don't think the product can do well with the average amount of advertising they'd spend on other products. I guess cheerful co-eds did better than stressed-out co-eds in beta testing. ("If you write anything, you need to get Grammarly!" says the cheerful co-ed sitting on a sofa before the first 5 seconds are up and I can skip the ad.) The other 5% of the time I see the one other ad they seem to have, which starts with a stressed-out young co-ed trying to write a paper late at night. 95% of the time I see the very same ad on YouTube. When does it all become too much advertising, i.e., a signal that a company is desperate for market growth?Īt least vary the ads, for heaven's sake. Frankly, when I see the extreme prevalence of Grammarly ads on YouTube, I have to wonder how much money they have to spare to spend such egregious amounts on advertisement. The monthly subscription rate is of $30/month, while longer subscriptions lead to smaller prices (for instance the annual subscription of $140/year is equivalent to about $12/month). Its business model falls within the class of freemium models, where a watered-down version is available for free and a full version is available at a fee, sometimes paid by universities for their students. Grammarly is a "cloud-based English-language writing-enhancement platform" (according to its Wikipedia description) positioning itself as a "writing assistant" improving proofreading but also targeting plagiarism-detection. Not too long ago I noticed I keep getting over and over AND OVER the same Grammarly advertisement. I admit it: at home I sometimes like watching YouTube videos when I need to take a break from grading. But then the other day I was shown a YouTube ad in Spanish and I don't speak Spanish, so perhaps the message is that there is still much progress to be made in helping YouTube properly target audiences in customized video ads.) I still don't understand why I as a university professor - not a student -have to be shown such ads. I'm not convinced that its recommendations, at least as shown in the ads, always make sense and the service has probably more of a future if universities pay for it rather than individual students. While Grammarly still seems to spend an inordinate amount of money in YouTube ads, at least the fact that YouTube now varies the videos makes it less off-putting. Shortly after I posted it, YouTube started varying the Grammarly ads it shows before videos. Other spots show that the writing-enhancement platform developed by Grammarly, Inc., is very helpful also when it comes to write an original term paper, with no mistakes in it, a first e-mail to your future team, or a selling offer.ĭeveloped in 2009 by Alex Shevchenko and Max Lytvyn, in Kiev, the app available for both IOS and Android, as well as via free browser extension for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge, was awarded, in 2013, the “Gold Award” from TopTenReviews Best Online Grammar Checker Comparisons and Reviews with a rating of 8.88.( Updated June 2019: For some reason this has become one of my most viewed recent posts. The song used in the ad is “Coyote Mischief” by Matt Haick. Luckily for him, Grammarly helps him to avoid grammar mistakes, such as “Maybe its fate?”, as well as spelling, punctuation, word choice, and style mistakes, and this leads to a first date with the girl, who seems to be impressed by his English writing skills. One of the spots, titled “The Opening Line”, features a guy who, after finding a match on a dating app, tries to come up with the best opening line to impress her and write correctly from all points of view.
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