You paid money for that?

I just got a call from someone claiming that I “filled out an online form” asking for more information about “an online education.” When pressed, the nice woman kept changing her story about who she was calling for or how she got my phone number. Eventually she admitted that they have a collection of 50 or more websites and it’s very possible that I didn’t give them my information directly.
She did want to reassure me that I had “no obligation to respond.”
How very thoughtful of her to reassure me that some random person giving her my corporate phone number does not obligate me to anything.
I don’t believe for a second that anyone who knows me signed me up to receive information. But I do appear to have gotten on some new mailing list recently. I’m getting a lot of ‘internship’ and ‘summer work’ offers in snail mail. These advertisements that are clearly targeting a different demographic than the one I belong to.
At least 4 companies (so far) seem to have paid good money for totally fake information about me. Of course, when they’re calling or sending me mail there’s no way I can stop it or fix it. I can’t even tell them their vendor is giving them bad information. I guess I just have to take comfort in the fact that they are wasting their money. I only wish they weren’t wasting my time as well.
This is just one example of why purchasing information, or trusting information filled into websites, is a bad idea. The company selling my information makes their profit and it doesn’t matter that their information is bad. If it really was someone filling in my information, that person is wasting the company’s time.
I’ve worked with marketers long enough to know that they just consider the bad data a cost of doing business. Data integrity just isn’t relevant to making a profit. Send enough email, send enough postcards, ring enough phones and profit appears. Even if their targets aren’t what they were sold.

Transactional advertising
Filtering secret sauce

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Turn it all the way up to 11

I made that joke the other night and most of the folks who heard it didn’t get the reference. It made me feel just a little bit old.
Anyhow, Mickey beat me to it and posted much of what I was going to say about Ken Magill’s response to a very small quote from Neil’s guest post on expiring email headers last week.
I, too, was at that meeting, and at many other meetings where marketers and the folks that run the ISP spam filters end up in the same room. I don’t think the marketers always understand what is happening inside the postmaster and filtering desks on a day to day basis at the ISPs. Legitimate marketing? It’s a small fraction of the mail they deal with. Ken claims that marketing pays the salaries of these employees and they’d be out of a job if marketing didn’t exist. Possibly, but only in the context that they are paid to keep their employers servers up and running so that the giant promises made by the marketing team of faster downloads and better online experiences actually happen.
If there wasn’t an internet and there weren’t servers to maintain, they’d have good jobs elsewhere. They’d be building trains or designing buildings or any of the thousands of other jobs that require smart technical people.
Ken has no idea what these folks running the filters and keeping your email alive deal with on a regular basis. They deal with the utter dregs and horrors of society. They are the people dealing with unrelenting spam and virus and phishing attacks bad enough to threaten to take down their networks and the networks of everyone else. They also end up dealing with law enforcement to deal with criminals. Some of what they do is deal with is unspeakable, abuse and mistreatment of children and animals. These are the folks who stand in front of the rest of us, and make the world better for all of us.
They should be thanked for doing their job, not chastised because they’re doing what the people who pay them expect them to be doing.
Yes, recipients want the mail they want. But, y’know, I bet they really don’t want all the bad stuff that the ISPs protect against. Ken took offense at a statement that he really shouldn’t have. ISPs do check their false positive rates on filtering, and those rates are generally less than 1% of all the email that they filter. Marketers should be glad they’re such a small part of the problem. They really don’t want to be a bigger part.

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Affiliate mailers struggling

What are affiliate mailers?

Affiliate mailers collect email addresses and then rent access to those addresses out to 3rd parties. There are a wide range of vendors that fall into the affiliate category. Some vendors compile lists through co-registration, others compile lists themselves through website opt-ins and some affiliate vendors fulfill mailing requests by hiring affiliates. There are, of course, some senders in the affiliate space that don’t even pretend to send opt-in mail, they just buy, compile or harvest addresses and blast mail to those addresses.

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Spam is not a valid marketing strategy

This seems like an attempt to create the next big viral marketing campaign. It’s just spam, though, and not even good spam. There’s nothing about a random “click here” that will entice me to click on it.
Scammers? Spammers? Whoever Ryann Rasmussen at HighSpeedInternet is, she might want to rethink her marketing strategy. It looks more like an infection attempt than anything else.
HSI_Spam
I guess we can say that their mail made an impression, a very negative impression. There is no website at http://highspeedinternet.com. The whois record for highspeedinternet.com is behind domains by proxy. The mail violates CAN SPAM. The address was scraped off our website.
Not all spammers are dodgy Russians. Some spammers are from Utah.

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