Slashdot Mirror
Building Better Spam
henbane writes "Cringely is plugging a new method of advertising from Dr. Jim Kowalick and Mario Fantoni. Their book entitled 'E-Mailing Your Way to Sales With
the Taguchi Approach' is out in the autumn. What could be worse than a method which increases the returns on spam?"
The return of Yoko Ono?
It is not our abilities that show what we truly are... it is our choices.
Cringely endorses spam! No need to read article!
Spam bam, thank you maam!
A stick dipped in rancid pork and shoved into my left eye. That would be worse. But not by a lot.
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
I for one welcome our new Spam Overl..... hmm this is too evil to even joke about.
A method that increases the return on spam AND the rate at which you can send it.
"Building Better Spam"
Less pork fat.
Coarser grinding.
More spices.
...aren't they making good money on carpet bombing? Why bother to target when you can reach all for pennies anyway. Of course, assuming you don't care about how many you piss off, which they normally don't.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
After reading the article I realized that I must be doing something wrong. I always click on every link in every email I get but still my penis hasn't gotten bigger, I don't have a horde of horny teens after me and I'm not rich.
What gives?
M
What could be worse than a method which increases the returns on spam?
A method which increases the return on spam and but not the size of anyone's penis, Nigerian bank account, or breasts.
Did anybody RTFA? What does this have to do with spam? This is a originally a way of improving processes, primarily in engineering and/or manufacturing. Now, it's been applied to marketing. Since when is all spam considered marketing? I give this article a -1, Troll.
maybe if spam was better and had more success for each email then there would be less email they would have to send out...
A hand up and a foot on every chest...
Reading another retarded "*BSD is dead" troll.
...this would give anti-spam developers insight as to how to improve spam blocking techniques.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
What could be worse than a method which increases the returns on spam?
Set someone's desktop picture and home page to be the goatse.cx guy. Truly evil, but it helped me train people to log off their machines when they weren't at their desks.
Trolling is a art,
A method that decreases returns, meaning it's even less relevant and we have to get even more of it for the parasites to make what they're aiming for?
-1, "1337" speak
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
still only works if people actually respond and buy your stuff that you're spamming for. You can come up with a wonderful way to market cow shit, that doesn't mean people will just buy it..
Oh wait....
Would be the advent of Interactive TV that works so Joe Sixpack can make the old WebTV crowd look smart, who in turn made us appreciate the AOLers.
SPAM is an issue, don't get me wrong. But that is why I have an address on the internet and an address my mates use. SPAM on one is high, SPAM on the other is zero.
This smacks as another "How to get rich like me" book where the real book should have only one page
"Write book to sell to suckers who believe this is special"
And finally, worse than SPAM would be the ability of goverments or companies to monitor your email to check you out and profile you.... but then that already happens, but as we don't see it we don't complain.
SPAM is a pain in the arse, its getting worse, but its still easier to do email now than it was 15 years ago, when SPAM didn't really exist.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
What could be worse than a method which increases the returns on spam?
The choice is yours...
Have included what look like quotes and email signatures. SpamAssassin even goes so far as to mark these down as reason email probably isn't spam. Fortunately, the anti-spam software (Spamassassin and Mozilla Mail) seem to be doing a good of keeping up with the changes.
the article is about a 7500 member opt-in list. That's not spam. A spam campaign would involve more on the order of 7500 MILLION mails. All this is is charging MBAs $1000s to apply the scientific method through linear algebra to marketing.
I'm not at all convinced this is a bad thing. If this can tell them that short, spartan ads are more effective than long, graphics-heavy ones, it could probably tell them that a huge, untargetted spam campaign is a waste of money.
Does this mean we will all have gigantic, perpetually erect penises?
Well, that's fine, since I'll be able to buy a whole lot of love, once that $20 million arrives from that prince in Nirobi..
Taguchi's objective is robust design, which means building a product, system, or process that works well even in the presence of degrading influences. That means products that deliver value without breaking and services that are enduring while being as simple as possible. Taguchi first determines the control factors that go into designing a product, their interdependencies, then generates an orthogonal array specifying the number of experiments required to find the optimal solution. [....]
That's when Kowalick turned the Taguchi Method to advertising, with the goal of significantly raising the response rate for ad campaigns. [....] The control factors included graphics, colors, and use of humor. The experiments themselves were 12 mailings to 625 addresses each -- two mailings per day over six days. [....]
The vanilla wafer recipe, however, will remain a secret.
------
So.... First of all, is it an advertisement behind an advertisement? Since many of us already has e-mail filter, how will this be not spotted by the filter? Hmm... I smell something really fishy.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Someone will redesign the %&*$@#$@ mouse!
"Talk minus action equals nothing" - Joey Shithead, D.O.A.
"Talk minus action equals
The breakup of New Kids on the Block, followed by one of it's former members becoming a big hollywood movie star and showing us a full frontal at the end of a hit movie.
Right, like thats ever gonna happen.
If you've ever wondered why the quality of Japanese cars is so high, credit Taguchi.
Okay, has anyone heard of a guy named W. Edwards Deming?
To paraphrase Tommy Boy, "I could take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed". I.E. *marketing* does not make quality. I never heard of this Taguchi guy.
Isn't that like pooping less stinky crap?
The article appears to be talking about opt-in email, not spam.
The cake is a pie
Cringley isnt' advocated better spam, but the Toguchi method in general. As an example of its effectiveness, he states that the two "e-mail marketers" improved effectiveness by 13,600% (that's 136x).
Because if they do, they'll figure out quickly that sending me spam won't increase their returns.
Spam isn't hated because it is targetted advertising; precisely the opposite - SPAM is hated because it is untargetted. That is, people get spam for things that they would never buy. Personally, I do get targetted emails - I've given my address to local retailers, and I get their specials via email. I'm not annoyed at them. I'm annoyed at the folks who spam me with stuff that I would never even remotely be interested in.
If making spammers more effective means that I won't get 50 emails a day for stuff I'll never buy, I'm all for it. If it means that I'll get discounts for stuff I do buy, then I won't mind too much.
WILDCAT IS ON TEH SPOKE
For those of you interested on learning Taguchi method. Here's a good intro.
--
Error 500: Internal sig error
Let's face it, spam with higher resposne rate is better than spam with little to no response rate. This could be the result of several things: better targetting (more likely to get to an interested audience), less offensive, more legit, etc. If all spammers tried to improve their response rates by simply cleaning their lists with people they know might be interested, and with products or services that were legit and of economic value, then the situation wouldn't be bad at all. I do tolerate spam from reputable companies I have done business with in the past or am actively looking to buy those sorts of products.
But that's just wishful thinking.
If everyone was committed to hitting a high enough rate of return with spam that could be great with users. Imagine spam with a 100% success rate. That would mean it was only mailed to people who actually wanted to buy the product or service. I'd say that would be a win for everyone.
.0002% to .0004%. Still not enough to cut down on the amount of spam we recieve.
Remember how back in the early days of internet advertising the starry eyed utopians talked about how you could use advanced techniques to send email advertisements only to those who were probably interested? Of course these were utopians we're talking about so they didn't bother doing even a back of the envelope calculation of the cost of finding the right 300 people to send your ad to versus just sending it to 10 million.
Unfortunately my understanding is the software referenced in cringely's article doesn't find the "right" people to spam, it just helps you punch up your ad copy. Which might double a spammers response rate from
The poster also slightly misrepresents cringely's article since cringely's not advocating the use of the software for spam but rather for auction listings.
If spam was targetted and effective enough to guarantee a 100% success rate then it'd be little more than a service to customers.
And if spammers could avoid sending 99.9% of their current emails and achieve the same income then it would make sense for them to do so - email costs them bandwidth, server charges and ISP hassle.
Yeah, I know that targetting and effectiveness will never reach anywhere close to 100%, and also that even if they did, spammers would simply consider the market unsaturated (Can't beat human nature). But my point is that increasing the effectiveness of spam in itself isn't by definition a bad thing.
Right now I get junk mail at home and I get spam. The junk mail at home is somewhat more useful, since I'm occasionally interested in coupons from the local pizza place or a $20-off coupon to Linens & Things. SPAM on the other hand, since it costs nearly nothing to send can be almost entirely useless to almost entirely everyone. If costs of sending spam were raised (via hashcash or signatures or whatever) and forgeries were difficult (through SPF/DMP/whatever), then spammers would either go out of business, or would figure out that I might be interested in the latest O'Reilly book (I'm on their mailing lists), or that if the local theater is showing all three Matrix episodes the night Revolutions comes out I would want to know about it.
Yes, there are privacy issues to targeted advertising, but I'd prefer _some_ targeted advertising over the "refinance your enlarged penis now!" spam I get today.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Andy Gibb, singing Shadow Dancing for eons and eons. And you have to wear orange plaid bell bottoms and sit next to the Bay City Rollers. /Dennis Leary reference
(OK, I'll admit, I read the fscking article.) And this "Taguchi Approach" sounds interesting, even if it's being applied to spam. I've dived the Waterfall Model, united teams with the Unified Process, spun out of control with the Spiral Model, and lived on the edge with eXtreme Programming. But I never heard of Taguchi.
Anyone have a few choice pointers to just how Taguchi works? And if it's as geeky as the article says, how come it's rarely (never?) applied to software engineering?
Cringley points out how standard engineering tools, in this case Taguchi's Design of Experiments (DOE) methods, can be used to increase the effectiveness of advertising. Claiming that he "plugs spam" is a complete mis-reading of the article. He points out the original study used "spam" in order to prove it's effectiveness; the study isn't dated.
DOE is how engineers make complex design decisions with as few experiments as possible. Mostly, he uses eBay as an example. He slightly mis-reads what Taguchi's DOE is about when he says that the old eBay data can be mined to re-create an orthogonal array. The whole point of DOE is a priori deciding what experiments to run, instead of the shot-gun approach used in the past. If you're gonna use data mining, then you don't really need Taguchi excpet for data reduction.
Personally, I recommended this approach to a high-volume eBay seller a couple years ago. He sells widgets with 3-4 different features (style, size, color), and uses a variety of terms to describe them (i.e. [stunning|beautiful|awesome] [rare|unique|one-of-a-kind]). Basically, he could run 16 or so tests using these various terms in the right combination, and determine which combinations were likely to work best. Ultimately, he didn't go down that route, but I'm pretty sure this is what Cringley was getting to before he got it confused w/ data mining.
Using data mining to do the Taguchi stuff is tough, b/c there are too many uncontrolled factors. I'm sure he'll get 100 letters on the topic from DOE experts and write a follow-up column next week.
As for spammers, I bet they start using DOE techniques, as they'll have to as fewe & fewer emails are getting through, making it a less profitable venture. Of course, legitimate advertisiers should be using the same techniques, and maybe they do. But DOE can be applied to any process, whether it is building cars, designing rockets, baking cookies, selling on eBay and, yes, sending spam.
From the article:
;)
They claim their work can be applied to any product or service and any advertising medium. And what presently requires sitting for those couple of sessions with Kowalick and Fantoni (at a cost of about $8,800) will soon be reduced to a $499 interactive software program that will run on a PC, bringing all the benefits of Taguchi without requiring that a nerd be enclosed to make it work.
The vanilla wafer recipe, however, will remain a secret.
Now where have I seen THAT before?
When men used to be men
The reduced the amount of crap they sent by using intelligent marketing techniques (like targeting) and by increasing the quality of the ads and the product they were selling.
Basically this whole "breakthrough" is the realization that you can only fool so many people so many times with junk.
So although, this may reduce the amount of spam from more "legitimate" companies it won't make much of a dent in those with no marketing talent which is virtually every spammer.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
I think that the underlying force here is that Taguchi focuses on what consumers want rather than what the producers want. Cringely is, I bet, banking on the idea that spammers will either transform into non-offensive advertisers of some form or realize that they can't do what they want to do (spam for money) and utilize Taguchi at the same time.
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
be a good thing if it increases the quality of targeting. The more targeted a spam message is ...the less spam that sender sends out.
That "last paragraph" was the only paragraph in the article the really talked about how this super black magic miracle method works. The article sounds like it was written by an MBA salesman trying to sell a product he doesn't really understand.
I've always wondered whethere there is any evidence that the various methodologies bandied about as the greatest thing (such as Taguchi, QFM, TRIZ and the like) really do work. Does anyone have any links that point to an objective analysis of these approaches and what, if any, measurable benefit they can provide?
Thanks for any help. I have an intro book on TRIZ and while it sounds kind of interesting, I'd like more evidence that these new-age approaches really are an improvement over standard brainstorming before taking the plunge.
GMD
watch this
Just delete every inbound email that contains this in the body : and
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
I am pouring Bowser's hot lava in my pants
a spam itself? The description of the Taguichi method and how amazing it is all sounded too good to be true. In reality, it sounds like an application of linear algebra to business. But the description- like reducing the time to develop a new sandwich to one month made me wonder if my spam filters would label it as spam.
"I hate quotations. Tell me what you know." -Ralph Waldo Emerson
What could be worse than a method which increases the returns on spam?
What could be worse, oh how about giving them free exposure on Slashdot. I can save you the time of RTFA, just target aol users.
Onward to the Aether Sphere!
If Taguchi works as well on spam we can just about forget another spam control methods!
(This sig intentionally left blank)
Let's adopt the "War on Drugs" methodology - Let's go after the users!
Let's make responding to an unsolcited commercial E-mail a criminal offense punishable by a large >$1,000.00 fine. When a spammer is busted, check their sales records, and pop their "customers" for a grand.
It is the regular 4 million morons who do business with spammers that are the REAL problem not the spammers!
Follow the money!
We forget sometimes that advertising, when done right, plays a crucial information role in our economy. The quick and accurate dissemination of information is vital to keeping prices low and efficiency high -- not just advertising products to consumers, but to corporations, as well as advertising for jobs and soliciting services. (*ahem* Not those services)
The problem with spam is that it is bad advertising, and advertisers have not yet really caught on about how much it infuriates their potential customer base. I think you'll find that companies really paying attention to what works will eventually de-emphasize spam in favor of less-intrusive methods.
The point of this is to generate more effective advertising campaigns. This is a combination of a: better ads, and more effective targeting of your ads. Ads are an unfortunate necessity of the commercial world, and frankly, ads can work to provide information to customers who'd be interested. I'd like to receive good ads. I want to know when the next book by my favorite author is coming out. I probably want to know about products that other companies offer that appeal to the same type of person (like Amazon's reccomendation services, but across all companies and product arenas). It's like TV, I want to see ads which are funny and have pretty girls in them, but I have no interest at all in ads for tampons. Same with email, target effectively, don't annoy me with ads for penis enlargement, and everyone's happy. Spam quits being annoying and becomes information about products that I might care about. Customers stop being pissed at companies, and begin becoming interested in their products. Everybody wins.
Eric
Did you know the nanobots that lead to The Borg were first developed as a solution to ring around the collar?
more returns == buckets more spam
From a supply/demand standpoint, a larger pie will mean more people trying for it. All we need is one spammer out there who decided to get in because of the higher rates, and the total spam increases. I doubt any of the others will simply be happy with their current levels of penis pump sales; there could always be more.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
As an advertiser in search engines and other mediums, this would be a great way for me in increase my conversion rate. With a tool like ConversionLogic Keyword Tracking one can now use the methods described, and accurately measure the worth of a search or affiliate campaign based on different versions of ad copy produced.
But yes, spammers will be reading this with interest as well :-)
Newsfollow.com
If spam is illegal is certain jurisdictions, wouldn't sale of this book in those jurisdictions be akin to inciting criminal behavior? What would be the financial liabilities of this? (Obviously IANAL.)
This is the only way to stop this. Either enact enormous fines for the end advertisers, or let us sue them for the costs of dealing with their unwanted advertisements ( much as we do now with unsolicited faxes here in my state ).
Its impossible to catch and stop all the actual spammers, but the things they are pushing HAVE to be traceable to someone in order to make the sale.
Make it too costly a risk to do advertising this way and it will stop.
And yes I'm appalled by the sue-happy and legislate-happy state we are becoming, but sometimes it IS appropriate and unfortunately needed.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I meant to say "QFD" and not "QFM" in my above post.
I thought MR2 http://www.kowalick.com/was a Toyota http://www.toyota.com/html/shop/vehicles/mr2_spyde r/.
1. Don't ever buy anything from SPAM no matter how attractive the offer is. You must not reward their behavior.
2. Don't ever buy anything from telemarketers no matter how attractive the offer is. You must not reward their behavior.
3. Don't ever buy anything from door-to-door salesmen now matter how attractive the offer is. You must not reward their behavior.
MORTAR COMBAT!
For fuck's sake, I thought whatever we say on IRC remains private!
Jesus Christ, girl? Are you drunk again?
Pirated copies of Taguchi interactive software program that will run on a PC for only $99! And it'll also increase your penis size!
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Given that Spam(tm) is a pork product, and also given that pigs are biologically very similar to humans, could one not produce better Spam(tm) by using people instead of pigs?
Yeah, yeah, all advertising is bad, spam is bad, commercials are bad (or so I think, YMMV).
But I haven't really thought about the Taguchi method in non-lab settings before I read this article. How about applying it to user interface design? Gnome guys, are you listening?
(Maybe then we would find something better than "tabs" implemented in every single app...)
Or we've all because suckers ;o)
Bob Pease wrote a detailed refutation of a voltage
regulator circuit design which was optimized with
the Taguchi method and published in Electronic
Design magazine in the late 80s. The resistance
values in the circuit just looked fishy and his
analysis revealed that the circuit would not work.
The input voltage would track the output voltage.
The author had made certain the performance was
independent of the quality of the parts alright. A
fair argument could be made that the author did
not properly apply the Taguchi method. Bob's point was
the output has to depend on something. In this case, it
depended on a zener diode. The author thought he was
accomplishing something by making the output
independednt of the components. He didn't consider
that the circuit wouldn't work then. So be very
careful with this Taguchi stuff.
Wansu, th' chinese sailor
You haven't sent me the $19.95 the e-mail requested, of course! Send me the money, and I promise I'll deliver the possiblity of perhaps maybe getting all your desires.*
(*note: "all your desires" is defined as "an e-mailed receipt** showing you paid $19.95 for penis enlargement.)
(**note: by "e-mailed receipt", we mean e-mailed to all your friends, relatives, and co-workers.)
Unoriginal repeating troll: instance 1 can be found here. Disregard this rubbish. The talk of "liberals" gives it away that this is nothing more than a flag-waving pederast. George Bush waged an illegal war and the above troll loved it. It's worked him/her up into such a fevered pitch that everything is a battle now.
I spent hundreds on cow shit. Dumped it in my garden. Now I dont have to pay for a new cucumber for each night.
I heard that the spammers are now sending mp3s as attachments with their spam, as a way of increasing the response rate. You should investigate this. But before you investigate, you should sue all these spamm^H^H^H^H^Hpirates before they distribute any more mp3s.
I suggest you act now, or you might not be able to afford leather seats on your next Mercedes.
Bring down George Bush II. Us liberals hate him even more than we ever hated Nixon and that's a lot.
I don't care what brings that ape and his fascist bunch of cronies (I can't even imagine why people would vote for these guys!) down.
"rm -rf ~" is a harsh but fair lesson that people never forget
...the Nigerian/Zimbabwian 419'ers will target rich gullible people and leave me alone.
...my girlfriend will get adverts for clitoris-enhancement pills.
...I won't get spam for mortgages and credit services which only apply to residents of the USA.
...they'll realize that I already have a cupboard full of teen sex slaves and that I don't need to pay money for their services.
...the system will show them that their product sucks and they won't bother trying to sell their products and move on to something worthwhile
I've found some references to it's use in software testing, nothing yet about how one might use it to design internals but it certainly looks like it can help you focus in on user interface design and which parts to bulletproof the most. I have some research to do.
It's interesting to note that one article indicates it uses signal to noise as it's measure of robustness.... I'd think slashdot was doomed.
(For the humor impaired: yes, I know that noise is defined to be uncontrolled variance, I'm trying to make a funny.)
[Interior, spammer's basement]
Spammer 1 Shucks. I reworded our penile enlargement uh...notification, and it now gets one hundred times as many responses!
Spammer 2Yay! So we only need to send out one hundredth as many! And we still get rich!!!
Imagine spam with a 100% click return rate! I'd almost feel sorry for the poor web and db servers as they got DDOS'd into oblivion.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Tired of unsolicited email belittling your manhood? The Executive Office of Adequacy (US Federal Trade Commission) is here to help.
Aparently, a new database similar to the No Call Registry allows you to register your organ as "Big Enough," after which spammers are not allowed to send you penis enlargement ads anymore.
Really, it should have been BigEnough.gov, but I guess "org" was too appropriate to resist.
Until the disreputable spammers learn to market bad products and scams with a far higher response rate. You can expect reputable companies to find the best way to maximize returns and still maintain thier reputations, but you expect to much from those selling illegal foriegn narcotics and ED cures.
Give it a week for advanced Bayesian statistical filters (like DSPAM) to learn the new patterns and then you'll never see them again. Honestly, I don't know why people are still complaining about spam - our system has caught 99.9% of all my spams (about 50-60 per day for me, 150 per day for my wife). Why waste cycles when there are free solutions that work.
Not so fast. It is my understanding that telemarketers and spammers often exploit those are not making rational decisions for themselves and are unable to say no. This is the legal version of taking candy from a baby.
Just because it is happening to someone else's addled grandmother or retarded cousin, shouldn't absolve any of us from our responsibility to protect the weak (and kill spammers dead).
what a cynic you are! man, you need a hug you dumb motherfucking faggot. it's friday, settle down with the bullshit. go buy yourself some friends and some tequila and some whining about how George Bush II fucking owns you. yeah, George Bush II fucking owns you. he knows that you whack off in your room every night because you have yet to iniciate a conversation with a girl. he feels sorry for you. i feel sorry for you. for fuck's sake, your mother feels sorry for you. YOUR MOTHER ACTUALLY WANTS YOU TO GET LAID! i mean, come on - cut the shit out and get a fucking life you cumquat. i feel very sorry for you but at the same time, i want to punch you in your fat head, you fucking tool. what the fuck? fuck you, don't be a douche. it's time to stop whining about this shit and start doing something about it. like, next time you see a broad at the coffee shop where you have to go because you're a pseudo-intellectual liberal that believes in affirmative action and women's rights and welfare and compensation for slavery, talk to the broad. ask her what she does. tell her you'd like to take her out on a date sometime. and if she actually says yes, go on a fucking date. and don't talk about how mcgovern got his ass handed to him in 1972 and lost 49 out of 50 states. and if she says no, for fuck's sake, go to a gym and get into shape. you're a fat shit and it needs to change soon. even if you still can't get broads when you're in shape due to your faggy personality, at least you won't die at the age of 25 from a heart attack - how embarASSing that would be, YOU FUCKING CUMQUAT! god, you piss me off with your bullshit. just shut the fuck up. vote for howard "the communist" dean and continue to wear your gay blinders - go ahead. who gives a fuck if you spend all your weekends torn between reading the communist manifesto and being a volunteer at the dean/stalin campaign headquarters? WHO FUCKING CARES?!?! no one. that's who. go out, get away from your computer, touch a woman's vagina with your tongue, shut the fuck up, eat shit. FUCK YOU.
Spammers used to be chickenboners living in trailer parks. They couldn't spell, and hadn't found about about spell check yet. Now it's becoming a real problem.
Then the article blathers on about how "Taguchi Method can take a project with thousands, even millions of combinations of variables and quickly reduce it to a couple dozen simple experiments".
Completely glossed over is the definition of the control factors in the first place! How does the Taguchi method help you to figure out what exact subjective concept about a given advertisement could be a "degrading factor" in the first place... that seems like the challenging part to me, the rest is just spreadsheets and focus group results, not exactly cutting-edge stuff.
The parent post is absolutely right, this is not an analysis, it is an ad: Robert X. Cringely, the day that I can quote you as saying any technology is "a bloody miracle" is the day your credibility hits the toilet. Why don't you team up with Cher and sell some skin cream...
pixie
don't mess with those geekgrrls
Cringely wrote that whole article just so he could unload a Bowflex?!
-Rich
What could be worse than a method which increases the returns on spam?
Plugging the book for free on Slashdot by pretending it's a news item.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
welcome our new Demming Method overlords.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
I read through the article and I don't think it's reasonable to automatically assume this will lead to better spam. What if the most effective advertising rate is to not spam? Supposedly this Taguchi method rapidly takes thousands of variables into consideration and through a few experiments, comes up with the most effective method. If experimenters include the method of delivery as a variable, they may find that another technique works better than spam.
From where I stand, I see the possibility that spam will decrease significantly. The Taguchi method could be the next big buzzword (or buzzphrase) and every spammer who wants to make more money (which would be all of them - why else would they sacrifice their ethics) might determine that there is some better method than bulk mailing to *@*.* with deceptive subject lines and random strings everywhere.
And even if that doesn't happen, the end result would be spam that isn't quite such a nuisance. Something that we might not mind as much. And if we're going to keep getting spam, I'd rather it not be the kind that offends, insults and annoys us.
I really hate signatures, but go to my website.
...I was sure that the story was about the Tamagotchi method, and was wondering out little digital "pets" could possibly help ad return rates.
Then it hit me - what if all those little digital pets were WiFi enabled, and talking to each other? "Beep! Feed me! Beep! Go by a Ronco Turnip Twaddler!" Scary.
You do not want less stinky poop. It is a fun thing to lure your wife into the bathroom after a real stink session.
When she walks into your great wall, hilarity will ensue.
Japanese car quality has a lot more to do with Deming than Taguchi. If Taguchi worked in advertising, Saatchi and Saatchi would be using it. Cringely also says that there are improved response rates. Big deal. You don't need more responses, you need more profit.
Not so fast. It is my understanding that telemarketers and spammers often exploit those are not making rational decisions for themselves and are unable to say no. This is the legal version of taking candy from a baby.
Just because it is happening to someone else's addled grandmother or retarded cousin, shouldn't absolve any of us from our responsibility to protect the weak (and kill spammers dead).
There are already fair trade practices laws that cover these cases and these people still get spam. I was mostly trying to make the point that sending an unsolicited commercial email is not in itself an evil act. If I'm trying to sell my old bike and I hear through a mutual friend that you're looking for a cheap bike then my unsolicited commercial email to you might be quite welcome. If that was the only kind of spam you ever recieved it wouldn't be an issue.
If you recieved say 2-3 spams a day for products you might concievably want then the spam crisis such as it is would be over. Sure there would still be some people trying to kill spam dead but just reducing it to a manageable amount would be good enough for 99% of people. The weekly supermarket flyer I get in the snail mail usually goes right in the bin but I'm not too mad about it because I don't get buried in them and I might at least potentially be interested in this weeks sales.
Unfortunately this kind of targetted spam won't happen until we pass a law requiring users to register their penis size with their ISP.
I really hate the anti-spam spin of this post. This topic could be much more interesting than the standard Slashdot fodder (No-Call-List, SCO, SPAM, etc.)
In this article Cringley mostly discussed how the Taguchi method could be applied to marketing on e-bay, not SPAM.
Another useful place, not mentioned in the article, would be Google Ad-Words. It's very cheap and easy to set-up multiple ad campaigns and Google has a great tracking and statistics tool that easily allows you to try out tests like this to build effective advertisements. Very applicable in my mind.
Another place that I could see this method being used could be user interfaces. Trying out various themes/layouts and tracking response times and clicks needed to accomplish specified goals could be an efficient way of building stronger/easier user interfaces.
I am not sure if this idea would work... but I think it's silly to dismiss this methodology simply because it could be used by spammers.
Use Python
If you read a little about it you see that less email was sent with better results so spam actually went down. Believe it or Not!
i ve.asp#106450064481484747
This was also reported earlier at:
www.sbblog.com/sbbloghome/archive/2003_09_21_arch
Welcome to Spam University, the world's top-rated educational institution for the growing spam industry.
Are you tired of your dead-end job? Want to make some big-time cash without actually working? Earn the money you deserve in the exciting and fast-growing spam industry.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
They aren't experimenting to get their -product- desireable by 100% of the people they advertise to.
They're tweaking the advertisement to make the product -seem- desireable to 100% of the people they advertise to. To get more people to 'follow up' on that advertisement and check out the product.
They aren't changing the product, or their advertising targets. They're finding the best way to present their product (word usage, images, stories, humor content, etc) to get as many people as possible to click that link.
You and I will get just as much spam.
It won't go up - because it isn't as if the spammers have been holding back because their hit rate is currently low.
And it won't go down - because they won't likely decide to halve their spam if their hit rate doubles.
Note the language used in the 'article'. It might not even lead to more sales they never refer to an increase in sales. It just leads to more clicks. (which is fine, as in marketing that's all they care about).
The interesting thing is that everything I found regarding the method online is nothing but vague advertisements for books or seminars. Ironic, no?
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
For some of us, Yoko never left. For others, Yoko's back with a dance hit or an art show or an idea that she wants to spread. Lots of people do not like her (or are anxious to parrot some overexposed stand-up comic and pick on an apparently easy target), but if I can be as innovative or productive when I'm 70 years old (as she is), I'll have lived a rich full life.
Thanks, Yoko.
But a prompt like :
"I left myself logged in and some idiot came around and changed my prompt to this long and stupid thing here. \nI cant imagine why anyone would do such a mean thing anyway. \nIt is very annoying indeed and I should probably remember not to leave myself logged in again so that it cant happen to me again, but I probably wont.\nWoe is me.\nWOE is me.\nWOE IS me.\nWOE IS ME.\n : "
Is pretty nice and should suffice to discourage. The worst part though was the people who could not figure how to to change the prompt back to something reasonable and who had to look at that for months on end.
Receiving unsolicited information is not in itself bad. If it's extremely well targeted to you and your interests and you like the information sent (in low enough volume), then what is the harm ? You get a few pieces of junk mail in the mail, no big deal but heaven forbid a few extra emails.. (assuming of course that spam could be accurate in targeting)
time to rtfa now
But consider the worm. There is some fairly cool technology in there to get them to work right. Right now that technology is being used mostly for evil. In the future the technology may mature to the point where we will wonder how we lived without it. As an example, instead of a slashdot web site, there could be slashdot worms that find you and deliver your content you want in real time to a computer or handheld device instead of you needing to query for it. It would simply be there on your computer. No more world-wide-wait. Don't laugh it could happen (or maybe not).
Similarly spam is using technologies in creative ways for evil. Yet the same techology is being used here on slash dot to notify me when one of you wonderful people comments on my comments. As the technology matures we may see new and wonderful things grow out of what we call spam; again maybe not.
However, both of these evils are responsible for a whole new set of technologies the thwart them. As the spam filters get better, the spam improves to overcome the latest improvements. The spam filters react and create new technologies which the spammers respond to and so forth. Worm and virus protection works the same way.
Each iteration requires using some existing techology in a new way or creating an altogether new techology. These technologies start to be applicable in other domains, thereby increasing and improving the general level of technology in the world at large.
As I gaze into the crytal ball, I see that the current war of spam and virus, like all other wars, will create new techology that was not considered and would not have been conceived had it not for the necessity of the times.
See James Burke "Connections" for a similar view of history, only much better.
Your friend and well-wisher
m0smithslash
http://www.ferociousflirting.com
Maybe, just maybe, this technique can be used to improve spam filtering.
If you DID manage to increase the rate of return on spam, it would mean that the people receiving it are actually receiving messages they want. Or that the people who don't wish to receive spam are being hit with spam less often.
Either of those are good things, if you ask me.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
mkdir
mkdir
mkdir
mv *
If you want to be that tiny bit more nasty you might change those to "...\ ".
Not that I'd ever do anything like that myself.
I was out in vancouver over summer and i saw a couple with 2 segweys... i was the guy going .. damn rich... i wish i had just one of those! ... mean while my girlfriend is like... those are so dumb! ...owell sometimes the geek is right ;)
I'll be using the "Paketnewschi Approach"
to download the Tamagutchi Approach
It wouldn't be spam .. so go on do this .. and get all these people who buy into spam as a means of advert to convert to a new method.. that might actually get their adverts to people who really want to buy it.
Who makes you Sig?
This is almost enough to make me change my views on burning books.
WURD!!
And I'm not a girl...
They also rely on the orthogonal test cases to be reasonably linear, at least between the starting point and the optimal solution. If the system is non-linear, it may find a locally optimal solution, separated from the global optimum by a "saddle point". Determining whether the system is locally linear may not even be possible in open-ended systems, such as human behavior.
In this particular case, the history of ad presentation (user fatigue) is a troublesome variable. The classic VW (old) Beetle ads were very effective when they first came out, but became less so when their originality wore off. Tastes and styles change. The Taguchi experiments should be ongoing, to track these social tides.
Taguchi methods are well suited to optimizing familar problems with known inputs. It is not the answer for unexplored new ground. It is the tool for the maintainer of the status quo, not the changer of pair o' dimes.
I work in advertising--I beleive there is a demonstrable difference between what we do, and... spam.
Generally speaking, advertising agencies use "clean" lists of email address where people have opted in, or have otherwise given their email address in a way that signifies their interest in a particular product or service from a company. They do not blast emails out willy-nilly.
Spammers harvest email address from boards and web sites, send out "seekers" for good addresses, or other generally unwholesome methods. They purposely send out huge quantities of email because its cheap--running the kind of analysis this article talks about is not.
If agencies can use this method to get better results, good for them! That means they are sending mail that resonates with the audience by giving them information they want--so its not spam.
> Unfortunately this kind of targetted spam won't happen until we pass a law requiring users to register their penis size with their ISP.
Nah, that would just mean they'd change the tack of the spam: "never have to lie about your size again!!!!"
What does this article have to do with email? The word "email" isn't even in the article.
Here is what companies need to do if they wany any positive return from me:
1. Make sure that I want to read e-mail that contains ads. For example, take $10 off my net bill every month and I'll opt-in to receive some offers that interest me. Limit the qunatity of such offers to a reasonable number.
2. Make professional e-mail ads. Please no heavy graphics, javascript, foreign characters, random subject lines that read "!!!!!!! Women will beg for more!!!!!!!," etc. Also, make sure that the companies that you represent are responsible for what they sell.
3. Provide effective methods for cancelling the service. If I want to unsubscribe, I must be able to do so without clicking through thousands of pages and user agreements.
This method has worked for me in the past. I was shopping for a leather jacket last fall and my girlfriend signed up for notifications from J.Crew. She received an ad about a hidden online sale, I went to the site and purchased a leather jacket for a reasobly low price (it was cheaper than anywhere I shopped in the area). I had no problems doing it because I knew that it was from a legid company that offered me a good price on what I wanted to buy.
Employ a fleet of people, working from their home like Google Answers or Expert Exchange experts, to browse usenet, blogs, web journals, forums, etc, and write individualized emails from personal accounts selling products. These people would have a product database of products from companies who are willing to pay for the promotion.
In other words:
- Jack blogs about this segway recall and comments that he isn't going to return his.
- Jill, a PersoSpam promoter reads this while browsing the web.
- Jill's PersoSpam Firebird extension automatically matches the text of Jack's blog with SegwayPaniers.com, a business in the product database that sells paniers for Segway HTs.
- Jill decipher's the Jack's obfuscated email address (jackDOESNTLIKESPAMrepressedanger.com) and writes an innocent sounding email to him about how she was just reading his weblog, and she just got these cool paniers, and Jack should totally check them out.
- Jill BCC's outgoing@persospam.com
- PersoSpam deposits $0.50 in Jill's account, bills SegwayPaniers.com for $0.60 and keeps the extra.
- ???
- Profit!
Might work, eh?Erik
The reason spam is so annoying is that we get so much of it, for things we aren't interested in. If we only got email about things we were actually interested in, not only would the senders get a much better response rate, we probably wouldn't even consider it to be spam.
I don't even mind the companies that send me info on products I hadn't heard about before, or are at least commodity items such as a deal on a DVD.
Perhaps the sellers of some products are desperate, but
So why do you keep asking me, and ignore me when I say to stop. That's what SPAM is.
Design for Use, not Construction!
I'm surprised that I haven't seen any discussion on /. about the new trend in spamming described in this wired article:1 282,60564, 00.html
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,
After I read it the day it was posted at wired.com, I didn't quite know how much it was prevalent, since I had never seen one appear on my home computer.
That is, until I had to switch off my firewall for a short time to try solving a problem. Almost immediately a pop up ad exactly of the same type described in the article appeared on my monitor.
The problem I was having with my firewall was with the game Earth & Beyond. When the game loaded, my firewall pop'ed a window to allow me to set a permission for the game, but it forced me to alt-tab to the desktop to access the firewall popup, and that would sometimes cause the game to freeze or lose sound.
So I turned off my firewall, and restarted the game, only to have the game freeze and crash, returning me to the desktop with a nice Windows messenger pop-up ad.
Bloody annoying.
I think you meant, "Since when is all marketing considered spam?", but otherwise I wanted to shout "Bravo". I'm an old-time spam fighter and loathe any kind of intrusive marketing, but knee jerk reactions by people who didn't even read what they guy said are counterproductive.
The thing is, email marketing!=spam. Spam is specifically UNSOLICITED bulk email, not all marketing email.
If you think that this distinction doesn't matter, just read yesterday's ruling against the FTC's Do Not Call list. The reason that Judge Nottingham ruled that the DNC list was unconstitutional is that it plays favorites -- it bans some unsolicited calls while allowing others. Specifically, it bans most calls from companies that are trying to sell you something, but allows calls from non-profit organizations soliciting donations, and politicians trying to get your vote or soliciting donations to their re-election campaigns. (That last one figures, doesn't it?) <wry grin>
Those of us who loathe spam and also value free speech have long chanted the mantra that spam isn't about content, but consent. It looks to me like a federal judge agrees with that line of thinking when it applies to a different, but related problem.
My guess is that, if Congress must choose between a DNC registry that affects THEM or not having one at all, fifty million Americans aren't going to have nearly as much effect as their self interest. And my guess is that the same type of thinking is partly why spam has grown from a nuisance into a problem that threatens the viability of email as a means of communication.
I hope I'm wrong on both counts, but I don't think so.
Catherine
The weekly supermarket flyer I get in the snail mail usually goes right in the bin but I'm not too mad about it because I don't get buried in them and I might at least potentially be interested in this weeks sales
I am so happy you brought this up. I like the weekly spams we get from the grocery store, and some of the other stores around. (I don't like the fact that Programmer's Paradies wants to sell me ActiveX controls, though) I like the Guitar Center spams. Reason?
I can throw them away if I'm too busy and/or don't need anything. I enjoy browsing through them sometimes (the Guitar Center ones, that is). I get genuinely excited about some of the sales they have, even if I don't go buy anything. I like the grocery store ones. We also get them from Costco. They always print the price you're actually going to pay, so my wife can go through them and put together a grocery list that if you shop on a certain day at a certain time and place, you will likely spend half the amount of money on your food than you otherwise would have. And they're really easy to just throw away when we don't have time to deal with them.
I call them spam, but they're not spam in the same sense that email spam is spam. The stuff you get in the mail is usually fairly targetted, because it costs a lot of money to send them out and get a fair return. It's not a deal where for every 10 you send out you get one back. You have to send out some statistically-calculated minimum number of these flyers to expect a return. In my house, we usually throw away every 3 of 4 immediately. The fourth one is the one my wife builds her magical list with, but when/if she does it depends entirely on how much money we have and how much time she has. The grocery store flyers don't go out to people who live in neighborhoods far from the grocery store being advertised. The aforementioned Costco and Guitar Center stuff comes to us because we're Costco members, and because we've bought a lot of stuff from Guitar Center. (yeah, when the day comes when Guitar Center mailings achieve the insignificance of Radio Shack mailings, then I'll bitch, but right now I like them)
Anyway, snail mail spam isn't quite the same as email spam. Email spam is pure evil. Snail mail spam is either useful, trash, or really stupid (like the contest winning stuff :) ). And there's never a large enough amount of it to be an inconvenience. The difference, of course, is that direct mail costs money, and email is almost free (I could spam from my house for free, but sooner or later my ISP would cut me off. Heh. Good thing I'm not a spammer....).
Like what I said? You might like my music
Another one:
/tmp/slowls, which contains the following:
/bin/ls $*
/bin/ls $*
Create
echo -n "Preparing "
sleep 1
echo -n "to "
sleep 1
echo -n "list "
sleep 1
echo -n "directory."
sleep 1;
Then do: alias ls=/tmp/slowls
Or have it output
echo "bash: ls: command not found"
sleep 1
echo "Oh, wait. There it is. Sorry about that."
sleep 1;
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
It sounded initially like the "genetic algorithm". We use this, its been around for ages and is taught in universities if not high school. Whats the odds they've just patented it and will be claiming the "Intellectual Property Land-Grab Rights" before long?
Microsoft has a new product called the "Microsoft Accelerator for Six Sigma":
Microsoft Accelerator for Six Sigma is an integrated set of products and services customized for Six Sigma practitioners. The accelerator can help Six Sigma project teams more effectively manage a large number of projects, more easily track their financial impact, optimize and track resources, and electronically share knowledge gathered across the enterprise.
cpeterso
Do you think that you'll ever come out of your shell and tell us how you really feel?
I know how I responded. I wrote a few letters to headguru@succeed.net (James Kowalick's company) and screamed at: Tel: 530.692.1944 Fax: 530.692.1946
Why not make spamming a "truely" ligitimate advertising form and regulate it like they do on television, radio, newspapers, and billboards? The Federal Trade Commission requires, among other things that advertiser cannot misrepresent the product advertised. The only pill I know of that can enlarge my penis is viagra, and that's only on a temporary basis.
This message brought to you by Jack Schitt's Previously Shat Shit
I'm the former general of the Nigerian military... will you help me move 200 million USD out of the country?
Haven't you heard the 'White Album'? Revolution 9, track 12 on disc 2, about seven minutes and forty-three seconds into it:
"..if...you become naked." --Yoko Ono
...because this means that companies will have to send less spam to get more profit. This in turn will lead to less spam sent, and more happy people.
The editors/contributors absolutely refuse to post a NYTimes link with a partner link that bypasses the goddamn registration screen, but they'll go to the trouble of looking for the printer version of an article so as to deny ad revenues to a site receiving a slashdotting. I wonder about you people sometimes.
If you live in a reasonably affluent neighborhood, you can count on getting about 10-20 pieces of mail each day, almost all of which are unsolicited commercail mail.
Winnowing through this large pile of trash to find the one piece (or no pieces) of real, important mail, takes up a significant amount of my time (about an hour each week).
Snail mail spam is just as annoying as email spam, and even more costly of my time and effort.
You meant delete all e-mail containing HTML tags.
You're right about one thing. Almost all spam I get is HTML e-mail, and almost all HTML e-mail I get is spam. Trouble is, I can't just block HTML e-mail because people who are first contacting me about one of my web sites may have not changed Outlook Express's compose settings, which default to "rich text" (HTML). What would be a good way for me to deal with this?
Will I retire or break 10K?
Winnowing through this large pile of trash to find the one piece (or no pieces) of real, important mail, takes up a significant amount of my time (about an hour each week).
That's odd. We get about that same amount of daily mail, and I can go through it in 5 minutes a day to pull out the useful stuff. I should point out that my wife enjoys looking through junk mail...
Like what I said? You might like my music
(Change the desktop background of AFK users who haven't logged out of their workstations to Goatse's hello.jpg)
Nice Idea. Until your boss will catch you doing that. In some companies that coud be the last day.
Unless your boss is in on it as well, and the company's computer use policy states that the company is not responsible for any sexual harassment performed when an employee forgets to log out of a workstation.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Notice how this article raves redundantly about the 'miraculous Taguchi Approach' without ever once giving any clue as to how the method works?
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
"Vectors" are a construct from linear algebra; if you're not familiar, please review an introductory text on linear algebra. "Orthogonal vectors" are vectors that are perpendicular in vector space. You can test whether two nonzero vectors in an inner product space are orthogonal by taking their dot product. (The dot product of two vectors is a scalar; to compute it, multiply them element-wise and then sum all the products.) If the sum is close to zero, the vectors are close to orthogonal.
You can learn more on Wikipedia.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Exactly why I do not use HTML mail.
I'm against death sentences, can't we just kill them until they're only just breathing?
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
Darl C Mcbride
1799 Vintage Oak Ln
Salt Lake City, UT
The point is to increase the response rate... so why would a spammer lower the volume if his response rate goes up? Sending spam is cheap.
Are you a grammar Nazi? I'm trying to improve my English; please correct my errors!
As you know by now, it's not about spam.
You may feel, like I did, a compelling fascination with the juxtaposition of the concepts of science, engineering, and sales. Can sales technique be scientifically applied?
But it's not about spam. It's really about the holy grail. It's a religious quest. It's a mantra. It's the salesman's answer to how to move that product that consumers just haven't picked up on.
When you apply the term 'scientific' to something that is inherantly intuitive, you raise eyebrows and draw the attention of both the science minded and the the wishful thinkers.
Unfortunately there is no way to quantify the technique or any particular application of it. There is no sure way to say "This is what would have happened if we didn't use the technique." And thus there is no scientific aspect to it.
It is a dream, a fantasy to be offered desperate marketers of unwanted wares. The purveyors of the dream seem to have succeeded in selling their expensive 'expertise' to some buyers, but you may want to take a more critical stance. If your product doesn't sell, consider a different product, not a different sales pitch. Build it and they will come.
...omphaloskepsis often...
Notice that the difference isn't that great -- the other guy uses an hour a week, you use half an hour a week. That time could be used more productively... or then again, you check if there's anything vaguely interesting on TV.
End result (assuming the Taguchi thing really works) - more spam, and the spammers are forced to use the Taguchi method to remain competitive.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
...
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"The approach condenses the experience of investigating billions of possible combinations for an ad, including copy words, graphics, visual impression sequence, and integration with a larger sales system, into a few dozen mailings or e-mailings," says Fantoni. "It is also a psychological approach that carefully considers what potential readers want to read. Copywriters and artists still have to write the words and draw the pictures that follow the procedures derived from the experiments, but once they become accustomed to actually knowing why what they do works, it becomes a way of life."
A very nice way of saying a lot without actually saying anything. Dancing around the heart of the matter. The whole article was just a big teaser. No real info.
This process is very different from the kind of testing that is presently done by major advertisers. A big advertiser may come up with several campaigns it tests in separate markets, but the approach tends to be shotgun, with little rigor in determining how one campaign is different from another and what influences are actually being measured.
This is complete BS. Big advertisers do run "experiments." They adjust ad parameters (especially in the on-line world, where it's cheap and almost instant to change something) to maximize returns. They have people that are schooled in this very science, they adjust parameters and note the change in response rate.
And what presently requires sitting for those couple of sessions with Kowalick and Fantoni (at a cost of about $8,800) will soon be reduced to a $499 interactive software program that will run on a PC, bringing all the benefits of Taguchi without requiring that a nerd be enclosed to make it work. The software should be available this fall, as will a book published by Breakthrough Press and titled E-mailing Your Way to Sales With the Taguchi Approach.
So what you really mean is that it will be on KaaZaa this fall? So that us laypeople can get down with Taguchi? Whoopee!
The vanilla wafer recipe, however, will remain a secret.
Keep it! That basically sums up my view of the Tah Gucci "Approach."
Must-not-watch TV!
Did anybody notice that the description of what the computer program does is awfully similar, allowing for humorous exaggeration in the books, to that decision-justifying computer program mentioned in one of the Dirk Gently books?
Editor Emeritus and Senior Writer, TeleRead.org