Anne Holland

Spammed by New York Times' Affiliate

July 20th, 2003

An affiliate of the New York Times (print) just spammed me with what appears to be an authorized mailing.

As I’ve noted in our MarketingSherpa List of Shame repeatedly – print subscription sellers are among the absolute worst as an industry when it comes to allowing spammers to mail their offers. I assume they put out the offer on a CPA basis and then don’t care who sends it or what list they send to — just pay for positive results an figure the bad can’t hurt them because the spammers IP server will be shut down or black-listed, not the circulation marketer’s.

This reveals an almost complete disconnect between the direct response-driven (genumbers now) headset of mag circulation marketers, and the ultra-image-sensitive headset of the brand marketers who place ads in magazines.

Every time a major CPG or other big consumer brand has shown up on the List of Shame, their agency and often their internal brand managers have been all over us in a matter of minutes to find out where the bad mail came from and stop it.

Only a couple of the magazines who’ve shown up on our list have fretted over it. From the rest – silence.

Categories: Uncategorized Tags:



We no longer accept comments on the MarketingSherpa blog, but we'd love to hear what you've learned about customer-first marketing. Send us a Letter to the Editor to share your story.