Digital + Social

Alliance Data Systems Corp. has announced that its Epsilon unit will acquire DoubleClick E-mail solutions for $90 million.

The deal will give Epsilon a stronger presence in the retail, travel, publishing and consumer-packaged-goods markets. It will also give Epsilon 400 more clients, such as J. Crew, Patagonia, Unilever and Proctor & Gamble.

For a company that no one heard of until recently, Goodmail sure was able to stir up the Net Nannies with its announcement that AOL was going to start using its certified e-mail service and charge bulk mailers for guaranteed delivery of their blasts with the graphics and links intact.

With all the empty-headed, alarmist crap that was published last week about the AOL-Goodmail announcement, it was refreshing to run across a thoughtful assessment of the news from permission-marketing guru Seth Godin on his blog:

There has been a lot of buzz in the national media lately about GoodMail’s Certified Email solution. Some are touting it as a solution to the spam problem. The reality from my perspective is that GoodMail is a bad solution.

Richard Gingras says he suddenly knows what it’s like to be a politician or a celebrity. The cofounder/CEO of Goodmail Systems says he’s only trying to help commercial bulk e-mailers attain higher open rates while allowing consumers to once again trust that the e-mails they receive are from the stated recipient.

After an initial outcry over last week

After an initial outcry over last week’s announcement that AOL was implementing Goodmail’s CertifiedEmail program, some prominent e-mail marketing executives have come out in favor of the deal.

AOL announced on Jan. 30 that it was implementing Goodmail’s certified e-mail service. Under the plan, AOL will charge senders a fraction of a cent per e-mail to guarantee that their e-mail will be delivered with graphics and links intact.

While e-mail marketers breathed a sigh of relief last week over the death of an Illinois so-called child protection do-not-e-mail bill, the situation concerning a similar bill proposed in Georgia took a grim turn.

When MediaPost’s Online Media Daily covered the news that four national advertising organizations and two online civil liberties groups had filed amicus briefs in favor of pornography group the Free Speech Coalition’s lawsuit against Utah over its so-called child-protection do-not-e-mail registries, reporter Wendy Davis dutifully included comment from the registries’ leading proponent Matthew Prince, who also runs them and makes money from them:

“Matthew Prince, CEO of Unspam, said he was ‘surprised’ by the attempt of groups representing mainstream marketers to get involved in the case. ‘I’m surprised that organizations like the Association of National Advertisers—whose boards are made up of companies like Wal-Mart and LeapFrog, and who have been at the forefront of protecting the rights of individuals and parents to choose what material comes into their homes—would support a lawsuit by the pornography industry, arguing that they have the right to send whatever and whenever they want, and to whomever they want.’”

After sitting through a marketing Webinar filled with a little too much relationship-speak, branding consultant Eric Weaver last week posted a rant on his blog headlined