If there were a journalism award for the year’s most ignorant, lazy cheap shot at marketing, an early contender for 2006 would be a Jan. 5 E-commerce Times article criticizing—through an “expert,” of course—an announcement that e-mail service provider Lyris and anti-spam software concern Mailshell have struck up a partnership.
The Lyris-Mailshell scheme is part of an industry-wide effort to keep scorecards on companies’ outgoing e-mail practices—for example, how many spam complaints ISPs get about them, and how clean their lists are—so that e-mail box providers can more easily filter incoming mail. These so-called reputation systems also help e-mail box providers spot blasts from unethical bulk mailers and divert their garbage accordingly.
Under the Mailshell-Lyris deal, Lyris’s presumably non-spamming clients get their e-mail reputations fed into Mailshell’s anti-spam software. This way, e-mail box providers using Mailshell can more easily differentiate Lyris’s clients’ permission-based e-mail from the penis-enlargement and “urgent-and-confidential” Nigerian spam choking their systems.
The beauty of this deal is that it has built-in, market-based protection against Lyris’s customers spamming. If Mailshell’s software suddenly starts letting a bunch of spam through, Mailshell will quickly be out of business. As a result, if one of Lyris’s customers start spamming, Mailshell has a financial incentive to report it to Lyris so Lyris can straighten the e-mailer out.
“Selling anti-spam software requires that we be honest; we have no choice,” said Eytan Urbas, vice president, products, Mailshell, San Francisco.
The E-commerce Times article covered the partnership a little differently, however.
“[T]he plan has met criticism from some who see the Mailshell-Lyris partnership as less than savory,” said the article headlined “The Blurry Line Between E-Mail Marketing and Spam.”
“‘If I were in the business, I wouldn’t send out a news release about how I’m going to start sending out better spam,’” the story quoted Basex president and chief analyst Jonathan Spira as saying. “‘That’s what this says to me. To have e-mail marketers in bed with anti-spam companies is a questionable practice.’”
The ignorant, all-marketers-are-spammers mentality behind that quote is so mind-numbingly transparent, it begs the question: what does Basex do that qualifies Spira to pontificate about e-mail marketing?
“Basex is the recognized expert in Collaborative Business Environments, the intersection of content, knowledge and collaboration within the enterprise, and has been cited by KMWorld as one of ‘100 Companies that Matter in Knowledge Management,’” says copy under the ‘about Basex’ tab on the company’s Web site.
Oh, that explains it. Anyone who is an expert on “the intersection of content, knowledge and collaboration” is sure to be a whip-smarty when it comes to e-mail marketing. Let’s get that guy in the Magilla Marketing Rolodex pronto.
The real insult here, however, is not Spira’s cockamamie assessment of the Lyris-Mailshell partnership. It is that E-commerce Times published it.
Good reporters strive to be provocative while creating work that offers widely varied and often contrarian opinions. But they will also make at least a minimal effort to ensure the people expressing those opinions are somewhat qualified to assess the issue. While Spira may be a great guy—maybe even fun to go have a few beers with—his comment clearly indicates he is out to lunch on this issue.
Permission-based commercial e-mail is good for consumers and good for business. As a result, marketers getting “in bed” with companies fighting spam should be a welcome development.
Ironically, E-commerce Times provides an alert service that allows readers to plug in keywords that will trigger, you guessed it, an e-mail to their inboxes whenever a story containing the specified keywords is published. These e-mail alerts include a headline, the first few sentences of the article, and a link to the page carrying the full article along with, of course, advertising.
Call me crazy, but this just might qualtify E-commerce Times as an e-mail marketer. Does that mean its publisher a spammer, too? Maybe we should call content, knowledge and collaboration expert Spira and find out.
Or maybe not.
E-commerce Times’s editorial staff should take a stroll over to the office of whomever is in charge of their publication’s circulation and marketing and ask for a primer on how the company’s bills—including their salaries—get paid.
