I think everyone has a breaking point. Our computer system at work now automatically moves spam messages into a special folder. I reckon I get around 100 a day, or 3,000 a month. And what could I expect to get out of them?
Well, I could have been very rich by now. There have been at least 2,000 stock tips sent to me. They all quote what happened with the last stock they urged me to buy, and that I chose to ignore. It was $0,17c per share three weeks ago, and now is $4 a share. If I’d bought the 100,000 shares they’d so kindly reserved for me, today I’d have $383,000 dollars. But idiot that I was, I never reacted. So R2.5-million has gone down the drain.
Fortunately they’d sourced an even better opportunity for me—
I could also be walking very strangely now. I don’t know who spilt the beans on me, but my manhood and sexual performance are certainly dubious. From Viagra to Cialis – four hours of “rock hard” pleasure awaits me. If I then just give in, and take advantage of this and the next offer, I think I might turn into a sex dynamo. Why? Between the “double the length and growth”, to “increase your ejaculation fivefold”, I could turn into something pretty hot between the sheets. Only problem is that I’m sure it has to affect the way I walk— but it’s a small price to pay.
But jokes aside, the level of the problem is truly astromic. Bill Gates receives four million e-mails a year! And this is really a drop in the ocean when compared to the total world-wide volume of 90 billion, yes billion, a day. If one expressed this annually, it is 32,850,000,000,000 spam mailings a year!
The natural conclusion one has to reach is that it must work, no matter how low the response rate. Normally with a direct campaign, a response rate of 0.5 – 1 percent would not be seen as being outside the norm. So that is one response in 100. For the sake of argument, lets say response is 100 times worse to spam – say, one in 10,000. Effectively this implies over three billion responses.
So this is clearly a huge business – not only for selling snake oil and Viagra, but to push pornography, and even “spike” share prices. Result? A US court recently sentenced a spammer to nine years for shooting out a paltry 10 million spam messages a day. An Australian court also convicted a gentleman who claimed a certain share was about to take off. Sure it did! He sent out four million spam messages and the next trading day the stock price doubled, and trading volumes increased tenfold.
I suppose this leads to the sticky question of whether this indeed is a legitimate medium and whether one should be using it. One can’t argue on any logical platform – there is no doubt it has to work. It gives one massive coverage, and through sheer numbers, extraordinary response. All for a truly nominal cost. Clearly one has to overcome sticky issues such as legality, but I’m sure this can be achieved.
So what we are really dealing with is right to privacy, and the desire to not be irritated by advertisements. Honestly though, one has to ask what makes spam any different to other legitimised ad-channels? It would be really hard to find consumers who claim to listen to the radio, read newspapers or watch television in order to be exposed to the adverts.
So is this maybe not just a new, more effective, cheaper medium than anything that has come before it?
Makes one think—and maybe capitulate. Walking funny appears to be a small price to pay given the benefits of the result.
Harry Herber is group managing director at The MediaShop Group.