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Oh Wait. Email Marketing Is Thought Of As Spam
from the wake-up dept
Here's an article written by an "email marketing consultant" as she realizes that most people think that what she does is spam. So, suddenly, she gets worried that people will have the same opinion of email marketing as they do of telemarketers. What she doesn't seem to realize is that most people are way past that point and think of email marketers as just as bad, if not worse, than telemarketers. The time to change that image was quite a while ago.
Reader Comments
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Well duh!
I feel that it long past the point where people may START thinking that email marketing is spam, It is spam unless I specifically opt-in.
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Spammers and Free Speech
I pay for internet and telephone access, and it is my right to control how it is used. This includes the right to prevent the email (or telephone) communication that is conducted without my explicit permission. I reject the notion that the tele/email marketers are exercising their right of free speech by providing unsolicited advertisements, since I pay for the medium they use to distribute their “speech.” When I watch a television program, I expect commercials because it is clear to me that I am paying for access to the cable (or satellite dish), but not the production of the broadcast content. As such this comprises an implicit agreement between myself and the television network, that does NOT exist with the tele/email marketers.
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Talk About Missing The Boat...
I have the opportunity to interact with a variety of marketing/promotions people, and it always amazes me when one of them is simply aghast that people take a dim view of what they do. As you suggest, Ms. Jennings is wise to be concerned, but has missed the boat by about five years. There are lots of well-meaning people out there who just don't have a clue. Sigh.
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Regarding Cable and TV
Before cable, you didn't pay to have access to television at all (at least in the United States). Access was free, and content was paid for by advertising. In cable's early days, the only channels they carried above and beyond the same stations you would get via antenna were things like HBO - which carried content without commercials. It always seemed to me that you had a choice: get content for free with advertisements, or pay for content with no advertisements.
Now you pay for cable and get advertisements as well. Even on HBO (although thankfully still not actually during a movie). I find this akin to paying for your ISP and having to see banner ads on web sites. This is just the way things are now.
As far as email spam goes, it is hard to find something similar in the television world... there is nothing quite like spam! Really its closest approximation has to be telemarketing calls. If you really want to make a television analogy, though, you'll have to make something up: imagine if whenever you turned on your television, you had to wade through a half an hour of commercials for porn and make-money-quick scams before you could watch any shows. While your television was on, you'd still get these commercials at random times. Even this doesn't parallel the need to sort your real email from your spam email!
Yeesh, does spam suck.
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