MarketingSherpa Blog

In last week’s issue, we reported that no vendors had come forward to tell us about the way they encrypt email addresses in their databases.

This week, AdBumb haughtily announced that their vendor, CoolerEmail, did. I dashed off a note to Lars at CoolerEmail, asking whether they did, in fact, encrypt email in the database. Here is his response:

“We use a very light in-house encryption, which makes it difficult for someone who doesn’t know much about encryption to be able to read the data. The problem is that it can’t be that heavy of an encryption scheme, or our database slows WAY down.”

Either Lars is not in sales, or he knew we were going to come asking. “Very light in-house encryption?” Is that like pig Latin?

To me, very light encryption means that once you decipher one address, and have the secret decoder ring, you’ve can easily deciper them all.

We heard from another vendor this week. After I grill him, I’ll report back here about what they’re doing.

GotMarketing announced last week that they will be running all uploaded lists through a variety of tests to determine whether the list might not be an opt-in list.

Since this is being done with software (and software follows rules), there are a few ways that come immediately to mind:

• Compare uploaded list to CD of “email marketing addresses,” which someone at GotMarketing purchased from… hmmmmm
  
• Look for what might be a dictionary attack, where email addresses that have a high probability of being valid (john@aol.com, john1@aol.com, john2@aol.com, etc) are all on the list
  
• Authenticate all the email addresses as they are uploaded, and if too many are invalid, then there’s a good possibility that this is an old or bad list
  
• Look for too many webmaster@, info@, and support@ addresses on the list, indicating it was harvested by a spider

Clearly, this is a good thing for GotMarketing clients if it catches any potential spammers or even anyone trying to mail to an old list. If recipients of the mailing complain because they don’t remember opting in ages ago, then GotMarketing’s sending IP address could be blacklisted.

Will this really do any good?

No.

Spammers don’t use commercial services at pennies a message when they can buy software to do this from home for $40.

The kind of spam that’s still going to get through is mail from a sales rep who types in the email addresses of everyone he met at a trade show or mail from a company that appends their existing customer file and adds all those names to its list without the consent of the customers.

Did MindArrow get the patent of the year (or even decade)? You bet.

I don’t know why it didn’t get more coverage than it did. Thinking this was going to be another patent on something only they were doing, I called over there.

Jay at MindArrow told me that their patent for delivering streamed video covers the process of delivering a small portion of the video with the message, to reduce the lag time before the message starts to play, then streaming the rest in real time. He said it does not cover technology that requires a recipient to press the play button to begin the video.

Most interestingly, it even covers software that permits individuals to stream video to their friends.

I don’t think George Jettson’s video phone is ever going to catch on, but streaming video to friends can’t be that far off. Taking digital photos, then emailing them to friends is mainstream.

MindArrow’s patent could turn out to be huge. Because it doesn’t attempt to patent something that is already happening in the offline world, it may even be enforceable, unlike, say, Amazon.com’s “Put it on my Tab” er, uh “1-Click Shopping” patent.

MediaBuy$.us a new ad buying and selling marketplace online is set to launch Oct 1st. The site was founded by Chick Inc an LA-based agency who do a lot of media buying for the entertainment industry, especially B2B (or I guess you could call it B2E). Hollywood Reporter is definitely on board.

Although it’s an online marketplace, they are mostly focusing on selling print ad pages in trade magazines. They have an ambitious
plan to expand rapidly beyond entertainment to a 84 different industries from agricultural to real estate. So I guess they’d be a bit like B2BWorks network only for offline instead of online. Which is neat, print media sales being changed by online sales tactics.

We’ve all seen too many B2B e-marketplaces crash and burn after announcing grandiose plans over the past few years to have high
expectations for a new one. It’s worth looking into if you are a trade publisher. Listings are f*ree.

http://www.mediabuys.us/

Oh my god! How fun is this? It’s past midnight here and I just got an email from an exec in Australia who likes our TortureaSpammer game. I click on the link in her signature to learn more about her company (I do this with all personal email I get. It is a great way to meet future sources for stories) and it leads me to this Flash-driven site for The One Centre. I think they are an interactive ad agency, was too overwhelmed by their presentation to really make note of it.

Why so overwhelmed when I’ve seen (and reviled) zillions of agency Flash sites in the past? It’s the way they use it. The site opens up and instead of canned music playing while big words and logos dance about on the screen, it shows the picture of a woman’s face. Then she starts talking, “Allow me to give you a tour of the site – if you’re interested in X, go here, if you’re looking for Y go here, etc.” As she speaks different bits of the nav bar light up indicating what she’s talking about.

It was a bit jerky, her lips and words are not in synch. For me it was thrilling. I hadn’t seen that before for a B2B site. It kinda blew my head open and made me think about the future of Web design. It’s been a very long time since anything really did that.

Last week we went from single to double opt-in for one of our publications, MarketingSherpa, because of the torture game. I figure we ought to put Best Practices in action (practice what I preach) especially because the viral game may be played by all sorts of civilians who normally wouldn’t know to visit our site
and sign up for subscriptions. The hurdle that normally pre-qualifies them for a subscription is not there.

Results? 82% confirmation rate so far, which means 82% are replying to the confirmation email in the affirmative. I try to think of the remaining 18% not as “lost” circulation, but as culled out “bad” circulation. People who didn’t really want our newsletter, and who might have viewed it as a pest in their inbox over time.

Has the ‘Net spawned a new type of advertising offline? Inspired, at least partially, by take-over-a-site campaigns that consumer marketers such as Ford, LEGO, even the little purple pill, have been testing for about a year now, HP is launching the print version. According to the spokesperson who just called me up, next week’s issues of People, the New Yorker, Sports’ llustrated and Newsweek will be completely taken over by HP ads. Back cover, inside front, and everything in the middle.

It’s the kind of thing that could only happen in a recession. But it’s kind of cool.

Tonight I got an interesting offer from my domain registrar, GoDaddy.com. They’re offering “unlisted” registration of domains. On the surface, this might not look like an email technology issue, but isn’t is obvious that spammers would take advantage of this service? For $6 (on top of your regular registration fees) per domain, you can register your domain to Domains by Proxy. This will make finding spammers that much more difficult.

Sure, I would like to stop getting email (as I just did today) for a domain that I registered in 1999, but have since let lapse, offering me great business leads. However, I’m not sure I want would-be spammers to have this kind of anonymity available to them. I hope Domains by Proxy has a good legal department, because I imagine they’re going to be getting a lot of subpoenas.

I wonder if one of the domains registered to Domains by Proxy were to spam, and were to be blacklisted. Would the blacklist be likely to add the rest of the domains registered by Domains by Proxy? Talk about moving into a seedy neighborhood! Let us know and we’ll post the answer here.

In the 12 hours since we launched our new online game, TortureaSpammer, loads of people have written in notes saying they like it. (Including one guy from a spam-stopping software firm who said, “You’ve immobilized the entire office, every desktop is playing it.” Hey, as long as it’s lunch-hour. Right? 🙂 ) Here are some fun further links from readers and friends:

1. Tim Gibbon of ElementalPR in the UK sent over his list of favorite viral marketing-related sites to inspire us to further glories:

Ha! Just got another email from our tireless ad trafficking guy Dan Zebroski: (typos mine)

“Another case of those dumb s*pam firewalls. A client provided text for their ad, it was loaded with our favorites, such as f*ree and c*lick to d*ownload. When I replied to their email, I said please change your ad because a number of the companies are turning away emails with those words in the text.

I sent the reply to them, not changing any of their text that was in an attachment, well about 30 to 45 seconds later, I received the following message:

Your message did not reach the intended recipient, it was rejected by email security for containing either; S*PAM, graphic
material or unsafe attachments. If you feel that this is an error please email the postmaster at.

Needless to say once we sent the original message and the error message to her home account. I didn’t have very much trouble
convincing them that they needed a change on their creative.”