In an earlier life, when I was the executive editor of our sister publication, Catalog Age, I worked for an editor who had built a reputation for speaking uncomfortable truths. Shortly after she hired me, Laura Christiana raised a firestorm among the magazine’s readership with an editorial in which she railed against the “junk mail” that was filling up her mailbox at home. Why, she wondered, was she receiving brochures, catalogs, flyers and more for products and services that didn’t remotely interest her?
Oh, the outrage, the umbrage, the indignation! Catalog Age had never before received so many letters to the editor, some of which cast aspersions on the editor’s intelligence and parental origins, and all of which castigated her for using the hated j-word (junk mail) in relation to what the letter-writers viewed as perfectly valid marketing overtures.
Marketing technologies and venues have evolved dramatically in the 10 years or so since I had a front-row seat to that fracas, and most marketers have learned the wisdom of tailoring their offers to their audiences. But there are sufficient numbers of renegades out there who are unrepentant. Back then, it was physical mail boxes filled to overflowing with unwanted mail. Nowadays, it’s e-mail boxes, filled to paralysis with spam. How much are you averaging a day? I get several hundred junk e-mails a day to my business address. On my personal e-mail, I get a similar number (but even more unsavory since that address doesn’t have the strict filtering our corporate tech support guys apply). Frankly, I’m not interested in offers for controlled pharmaceuticals, anatomy enhancers (you know which kind I mean) or views of barnyard animals on blind dates with unlikely partners. I have to keep reminding myself that e-mail and online marketing were once terrifically beneficial and exciting methods of sharing information about products and services I wanted to know about!
Which suggests that, rather than fighting proposals such as Sen. Chuck Schumer’s do-not-spam registry (see Managing Editor Patricia Odell’s story on p.14), legitimate marketers and the industry associations that lobby for them should be leading the charge to shut down the renegades who are misusing Internet communication and corrupting the channel. Otherwise, their promotions will get tossed out with all that garbage.
Want to know who’s marketing right and how? Check out PROMO’s 2003 Marketers of the Year (p. 28). Our editors have chosen 14 of the smartest, most creative folks in the business, and we are delighted to celebrate them and their work!
Network
