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.
...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
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.
...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,
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.
For those of you interested on learning Taguchi method. Here's a good intro.
--
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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.
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
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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.)
Only problem is that a business can Spam on behalf of it's rival to get the rival in trouble...
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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.
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.