Business Week’s Bob D. Hof has a brilliant dissection of the ‘Cyber Monday’ campaign, the much-touted farce designed by Shop.org to spur you to purchase lots of holiday crap.

Shop.org member Shmuel Gniwisch, chief executive of the online jewelry site Ice.com, recalls getting an e-mail from Shop.org last year, suggesting that online retailers come up with their own marketing hook to match Black Friday. “The online guys got together and said, ‘Let’s give people something different,'” he says. “The reality is, we didn’t notice anything special” on the Monday after Thanksgiving.

We’ve personally gotten dozens of calls about ‘Cyber Monday’ over the last week, mostly from confused print and television editors questioning why they hadn’t heard of this massive online retail fiesta. The reason is pretty clear, as Hof explains: for most major online retailers, ‘Cyber Monday’ isn’t the biggest shopping day of the year.

After finding out that Cyber Monday is a scam and that turkey doesn’t make you sleepy, our holiday season is seriously ruined.

Cyber Monday, Marketing Myth [BusinessWeek]

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