Stupid Media Watch: It’s all Spam to Them

From the “All-Marketing-E-mail-is-Spam” file comes a March 16 article by Forbes.com technology columnist Chris Kraeuter headlined, “And Then There Was Spam.”

Kraeuter’s piece aimed to put an entertaining spin on e-mail service provider ExactTarget’s recent survey showing that Friday is the best day to get marketing e-mail opened. The implication in Kraeuter’s column, of course, is that all marketing e-mail is spam.

Kraeuter says he wasn’t aiming to hurt anyone. He says he was aiming for a snappy lead and believed the benefit of exposure on Forbes.com to ExactTarget would outweigh any backlash from ExactTarget’s clients over Kraeuter’s use of the word “spam.”

“I think that the normal person on the street—and that’s who I’m speaking to—if you ask them would they consider a mass mailing from a marketing company spam, I guarantee they would say yes,” he said. “I’m not going to put in my lead double opt-in permission-based marketing messages sent on Friday are more likely to be read. That’s not snappy.”

However, Kraeuter’s spin apparently inspired other online writers to take his lead. And while Kraeuter’s piece was at least accurate after the spam reference, articles following his were not.

A March 20 piece on Internet security Web site Viruslist.com headlined, “Spam Tastes Better on Fridays,” theorized that click-throughs are higher on Sundays because people receive less spam on weekends, a connection not found in ExactTarget’s study.

The Viruslist.com article, written by Konstantin Kornakov, included other—albeit more understandable—inaccuracies, such as calling ExactTarget a mass marketer rather than a service provider.

Later in the day on March 20, British trade publication SC Magazine published an article by Frank Washkuch Jr. on ExactTarget’s survey—but it sourced and quoted Kornakov, inaccuracies and all.

The topper was a post on e-mail service provider eROI’s blog, “The Email Wars” headlined ‘Wait, you are reading spam?’

“I found this study amazingly interesting. We report (as do other ESPs now) on the best days to email. What is an interesting twist on this is a new report on the best days to spam. Basically they have studied when people are most prone to reading spam and opening it. This reallt [sic] boggles my mind that as much as people complain about it, they still are reading it.”

Executives at eROI said the post was an oversight and changed it.

Chris Baggott, co-founder and chief marketing officer of ExactTarget, said the episode “shows just what an education job we still have in front of us. … We’ve got to do a better job of getting our message out.”

But there is little Baggott can do if the message isn’t reported accurately.