More Spam, Ma'am?
Spam is nothing new and if the growing number of news stories and research pieces are to be believed, it's set to reach saturation point. While the most talked-about incidences of spam are email based, similar tactics and practises are now being used across all sectors.
The internet search sector is the latest to be hit by spam style tactics. A story in New Media Age has revealed that the World Association of Internet Marketers is becoming increasingly concerned with the number of unscrupulous agencies that are re-selling keywords at high prices - despite having no relationship with the vendors.
These agencies will purchase high ranking keywords from the pay for placement firms such as Overture and Espotting and then sell them off at highly inflated costs. Additionally, NMA reports that the agencies also undercut these networks by offering advertisers keywords at a lower Cost Per Click rate and then lie about the number of times the keyword has been entered on in order to boost payments.
It appears the advertisers are unaware of their tactics and the WAIM are worried that these kind of underhand tactics will damage the growing search sector. Certainly, this type of trading can only serve to create an atmosphere of distrust and confusion between the advertiser, network and search engine. One solution to this problem is for advertisers only work with companies that have a recognised relationship with the networks and search engines although this may be hard for advertisers to confirm if some agencies already reportedly lying about having "exclusive agreements" in place.
Another area of search marketing has been in the news recently with the interesting case of Reed Executive v Reed Business Information regarding meta tags, the invisible words used by companies in order to gain better placement in search engines.
The case by Reed Executive came against Totaljobs.com, a recruitment website with an association with Reed Business Information, after the latter used 'Reed' as a meta tag in its website. Reed Executive, which had registered 'Reed' as a trademark, argued that this was trademark infringement and passing off and the court agreed.
This lack of clarity has meant many companies are still uncertain of the boundaries and exactly what is and isn't legal - or ethical. One area in which regulation has been expected for some time is email spamming.
There cannot be a single person who hasn't been affected by unsolicited email at some time and, according to research from Brightmail the number of unsolicited email messages topped 5m for the first time in August, rising more than 300% over the past 12 months. Further research from Radicati Group shows that spam now represents a third or more of all email sent and predicts that 37.3bn emails will be sent each day by 2006 - 39% of which will be unsolicited.
These figures simply illustrate what we all already know - we are being increasingly bombarded by emails we do not want. Companies are trading in selling email lists and spammers are becoming more and more sophisticated (or, perhaps, devious) in obtaining our email addresses. With laws on unsolicited email still yet to come into force, companies are taking advantage of an unregulated landscape and, the majority of them appear to be getting away with it.
Likewise, the success of text messaging in the UK has created a whole new breed of spammers, with the young usually the targets of these "fantastic offers". However, as a mobile phone company recently found, the very personal nature of a mobile phone means consumers find text spams even more intrusive than emails, and are less likely to tolerate them.
Moby Monkey, the company in question, was fined £50,000 by ICSTIS, the Independent Committee for the Supervision of Standards of Telephone Information Services, after sending out large numbers of unsolicited text messages to users telling them they had won a mystery prize worth £500. It turned out the £500 worth of prizes was actually £500 worth of holiday discount vouchers that were subject to various terms and conditions.
This isolated case shows that, without regulation, some companies will bend the rules where they can. This goes for obtaining email addresses for spamming purposes, with email management company Lyris Technologies undertaking a recent investigation into spam complaints from hundreds of their customers.
It appears that customers of their email newsletters have been receiving spam from other sources and it's not known whether this is the result of a server problem, with "server hijackers" suspected, or just inventive spammers sending emails to similarly spelled addresses at a particular domain.
Whatever the reason for this particularly incident, it appears that these kind of techniques are on the increase and the action of simply 'opt-ing out' of email lists or unsolicited emails still offers little protection.
