DoubleClick Gets Into Spam

keytoe writes: "Well, just when we thought everyone's favorite Privacy Snoop was starting to mellow out a bit, we discover this little tidbit. DoubleClick is now branching out from the ad serving business into the SPAM business due to the fact that direct email marketing 'is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving.' Using DARTmail, you can now target your bulk mailings 'based on profile data.' I wonder which profiling data they're talking about. Perhaps, say, all the data they've been collecting for years?"

Comments

Call them and let them know how you feel.

[kolding]

From Doubleclick's Website, the number to call for information about DARTMail is 866-459-7606 (toll free). Feel free to give them a call and give them a piece of your mind. Remember to be polite, you'll catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. If enough people call to complain and ask to be kept off all of their lists, the following will happen. 1: They'll rethink their position, 2: they'll be forced to remove you, and 3: their phone lines will be clogged and they won't be able to make any sales.

Re:Call them and let them know how you feel.

[zama]

Actually if you want to wave credentials you'll lose - as an ex-employee of DCLK, an ex-client, and currently a list admin using a different provider.

So let's go:

1. How does DoubleClick verify that the lists in use are opt-in?
When you are negotiating for the process, at least one sales person and probably a pre-sales consultant goes to your site and goes through the registration process multiple times. Some of the addresses they then ask to unsubscribe - if you spam them anyway there's a problem. They also go through your privacy policy to ensure compliance.

Also, if you send out a mailing that comes back with large numbers of unsubscribes and bounces, that raises a big red flag. Lastly, there actually are people monitoring the abuse@doubleclick.net address. If a particular client crops up enough, it will be addressed.

2. What are the penalties if the list isn't opt-in?
If it's proven that your list is not opt-in then your contract is abruptly cancelled. And depending on how bad a PR flap you can be sued.

3. DoubleClick has no responsibility for spam like an ISP.
DoubleClick's number one responsibility is to its shareholders. Bad PR has significantly hurt their business.

4. Bulk email is the stated point of the DARTmail service.
Nyet. You are misunderstanding "bulk" means large numbers. If you send out 1.8MM newsletters like I do, Outlook or some small scale provider isn't going to cut it. That's bulk. The stated purpose of DARTmail is bulk OPT-IN email.

5. Cost issues.
We left DARTmail because it was too expensive. Period. Most SPAM is only cost-effective with a cheap CPM. That's not a 100% guarantee but a general truism.

I have no doubt that there will be abuses of the technology. DoubleClick's client base is large and there are certainly issues in monitoring compliance for that many clients. But there's a huge difference between a legitimate product that will be fractionally abused and actual spamware.

Good thing!

[GodHead]

I for one am looking forward to the "Nu-Spam". Since I have a B.S. already, I'll get ads from only the finest in unaccredited masters degree programs. Also, just think of the targeted pr0n. No more brunettes thanks, only the red-headed barely-legal college girls will send me invitations to meet them and their roommates on-line...

according to WHOM?

[Em Emalb]

"E-mail advertising, which is relatively inexpensive, is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving..."

According to whom?

Every single person I know complains about spam. Every single one of them deletes without reading the crap. Almost every one of them uses some sort of filtering/blocking.

And no, these aren't all geek-centric folks. Hotmail, yahoo, etc., all have basic filtering in place. Some UCE gets through, but most get filtered to their spam box.

Where the hell are these numbers coming from?

I realize that 1% of 10000 emails sent out is an acceptable return rate, but I wouldn't call it thriving. Show some solid proof that this is true and I will believe you.

Are people out there really this gullible? For pete sake, if I purchased all the products or services offered in spam, I'd be one highly educated, rich, successful, hung to my knee, always hard, in great shape, sexual tyrannosaurus.

And we know that ain't gonna happen.

Speculation

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I'm not one to avoid being a rabid alarmist, but the article really doesn't say anything that suggests Doubleclick is making data it has collected available to Spammers. The statement "helping advertisers segment their customer data to launch more targeted ads" suggests that they are making the technology available for these people to process their own data.

Maybe that's no better and I could be wrong but there's nothing in the article to suggest that they are selling actual personal data of any kind as part of this deal.

Read the article! It's for customers

[quistas]

Wow, 22 comments and no one read the article. It talks about how it's designed to help segment your customers -- while this probably has evil applications, the releases DC is sending out seem to be targeted to, say, Amazon-type companies that want to send emails to their own customer base.

-- q

Doubleclick's press release

[quistas]

Is here.

It doesn't appear to be spam-tastic at all -- they talk through the whole thing about newsletters/customer bases/permission-based marketing.

You guys really want to go after a spam tool provider, go nuke Earth Online, or any of the guys who produce stealth emailers.

-- q

Spam isn't effective - market forces don't apply

[Philbert Desenex]

I don't see that you can say "Spam is effective" with a straight face.

Canter & Siegal, the original Usenet spammers, gave it up after a year or so. Sanford Wallace, one of the most unrepentant spammers, with a history going back to fax spamming in the late 80s, gave it up. AGIS networks, host to Sanford Wallace, went broke. You can't name a single major company that spams. The only people who spam are pyramid schemers, shady pseudo-pharmaceutical marketers, online pornoographers and internet casinos.

Spam isn't effective, at least not for someone on the right side of the law - it generates too much ill will. Spam me, for instance, and I'll complain all the way to the top, making clear that I won't buy your product or service again.

What spam does have going for it is lack of control by market forces. Conventional ads, tee vee, newspaper, billboard, etc, all get paid for by the advertiser up front, before the consumer makes a choice about buying the product. Those ads must be effective, and must not offend too many potential customers, or the advertiser won't recoup the ad costs, much less sell any product. The consumer who chooses to buy a conventionally advertised product does end up paying the cost of the ads, but only after seeing or hearing the ad.

This isn't true of spammed ads: everyone who recevies a spamvertisement pays some amount for it (dial-up time, CPU cycles, disk space allocation, etc), whether a spammed ad convinces them to buy the product, or revolts them so much they'll never buy from the spammer again.

The Invisible Hand of the marketplace only acts very lightly on spam - spamvertisements can be as lurid and grotesque as possible because of this. That's why we need laws against spamming - market forces don't apply.

Spamming is theft, plain and simple, and spammers must be punished.

OK, tell me, is *anyone* is surprised by this?

[syzxys]

Does this really surprise anybody? Doubleclick has been a bunch of capricious, dishonest bastards for as long as I can remember. They were one of the first names associated with evil cookie tracking practices(tm) all the way back in 1995 (and even earlier?), IIRC.

direct email marketing "is one of the few forms of Internet advertising that is thriving"

As someone pointed out above, I wonder what they mean by "thriving." A 0.1% response rate is not particularly "thriving" -- I think it's more because there is no way to punish them for spamming.

Wasn't there some kind of paper published recently that showed that, in one of those game-theoretical situations with two equilibrium strategies (everyone cooperating, or everyone backstabbing each other -- I think it's called the "prisoner's dilemma"), people tended to pick a cooperative strategy if the group was allowed to punish backstabbers? Because IMO, the situation with spamming is very much like the prisoner's dilemma.

I did an experiment one time, I blocked doubleclick and a bunch of other ad sites at my firewall. The problem was, there were so many sites it was like trying to stop a firehose with a bathtub stopper. There have been efforts like the RBL, but they always seem to start charging money. IMHO, this is not just because they are "greedy," it's because their operational costs are too high. And why? Because there are too many spammers. I think the only way to really fight spam is with a distributed solution. Here we'd run into all the network poisoning problems people worried about with gnutella et al. in the early days. Is anyone working on anything like this? Is anyone even talking about it?

It seems like we're getting spammed with spam stories nowadays, not just from slashdot but on zdnet and others as well. Is spam getting worse, or is the spam lobby getting more aggressive, or what? :-)

Just my $0.01

---
Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!

DARTMail Targeting

[lord13]

I am a bit familiar with DARTMail (actually used the product), and from what I know, it does not use the vast amount of information that DoubleClick has for it's targeting - instead you upload all of your site's registration data, and target based off of that. It allows you to put together different emails for different groups of people, assembling HTML emails like building blocks.

The real murky area (I felt) is that what they do with the information once they have it... Do they integrate it in with their master list, getting even more info? I was assured that would never happen - that all of the info uploaded would be segregated, but I never read (or had access to) any of the fine print.

Re:Million dollar idea!

[curunir]

Oooh...and for irony's sake, they could distribute it using DARTmail!

Hi Friend,

Do you hate SPAM. Are you sick of direct marketers sending you a seemingly endless stream of stupid offers? If so, click here [links to software program to update the hosts file].

If you would prefer to be hung like a horse, see young, virgin, barely legal redheads or get a masters degree through the mail from a fully accreditted college, click here [links to a message explaining why responding to SPAM is bad]

Re:Junkbuster

[O2n]

The Ad-Zapper for squid works also fine, and if you're what the slashdot users usually pretend to be, you should run squid, not junkbuster. ;)

Also, for spam in general, or rather against it, SpamMotel and especially SneakEmail work like a charm; SneakEmail even lets you reply to (suspected) spammers without revealing your real address.

Of course, if you have your own domain/MX and mail server, you can generate these "one-time" email addresses yourself - but using sneakemail is just too easy and convenient.

Re:Do you know what spam is?

[Tackhead]

> Now, this isn't so say that all people are nice. That's not to say that people don't troll web pages and people don't fake mail-from headers. It happens. But there's also a lot of promotional mail that YOU OPTED INTO whether you realize it or not.

Bullshit.

If I opted into it, and didn't realize I'd done so (perhaps I'm the dr00ling AOLer you seem to think I am), then show me the opt-in.

That's what "double opt-in" (or more accurately, "confirmed opt-in", the "double" is your industry's language, trying to make it sound unreasonable) is for. Until you can demonstrate to my satisfaction that I opted in, it's spam.

>What I'm saying is, before labeling every piece of mail that you get as spam, try unsubscribing. And yes, I know that some unsubscribe links are fake. What are you going to do? There are also fake breasts and fake watches.

So, because some tits are fake and some Rolexes are fake, and since I wouldn't give up feeling tits, or wearing a Rolex, just because I can't trust the owner of the tits or the seller of the Rolex, I should trust you? Holy non-sequitur, Batman!

The overwhelming majority of the claims of "click here to be removed" are lies. The overwhelming majority of the "You opted in" claims are lies.

So what I'm not gonna do is this: I sure as fsck ain't gonna trust your unsubscribe link, that's what.

And what I am gonna do is this: Find your upstream, and report you to them as a spammer. Don't want the 2000 TOS violation reports? Don't spam.

And if your upstream ignores those reports, what am I gonna do? Well, I'm probably gonna add your netblocks to my private blocklist. Don't want to be blocked? Don't spam.

> And lots of other companies (like mine) that send lots of LEGAL, NON-SPAM, promotional email.

How come (and I don't mean you specifically, I mean the general case over the past few years) every spammer always tries to re-define "spam" in such a way as "Well, whatever we do isn't spam."

If it's in my mailbox, it's unsolicited, and it was generated in bulk, it's spam, and I'll choose to either block the server that sent it, or report it to the sender's provider. What are you going to do?