Adforum has been sending me their “Top 5 Ads This Week” E-mail for roughly two years. I cannot remember how this started - likely because of some visit to their site, but I can’t remember the circumstances.

The result was that, for the last two years and perhaps forevermore, I receive their fluff-filled newsletter. I do not bother reading it anymore. I simply delete it and move on.

Keep in mind, I actually have tried to unsubscribe from this e-mail in the past - several times, in fact. But it still comes here. So I set up an e-mail filter to keep it from getting to me.

The danger to Adforum for not taking care with their e-mail list is, for starters, that mail servers will start recognizing not just these messages as spam, but any message coming out of them. This can be disasterous to a company, particularly one that relies on its mailers.

The more subtle problem they create for themselves is to make everyone on their list feel like anything from AdForum is unimportant. Speaking as one of their unwilling victims, I can tell you honestly that I do not read anything they send me, and as such would be a “bad lead” for them. If you have a contact list full of people who can’t get off of your list, they won’t be receptive to what you have to tell them either.

It is actually a good idea to ping the people on your mailing list every few months if you haven’t heard from them, and make sure they want to continue receiving your e-mail. People seem to think the larger your e-mail list is, the better. Well, maybe, if you’re planning on selling it to someone else it is. If you are interested in the quality of the people on that list, though, you do what you can to make sure everyone receiving your messages wants to be receiving them. Continuing to send people an e-mail - whether they want it or not - damages your brand and reputation.

Adforum, you need to prune your list.

Unless you’re just selling my information to the highest bidder.

Which you probably are. *sigh.*

In the words of Howard Beale from 1975’s Network, “Woe is us! We’re in a lot of trouble!”

Congress and the FTC have been impotent to protect E-mail from spammers, and recent changes to the laws have only made an ineffective law laughable. (Read the article here.)

What drives this kind of spam, anyway? Does anyone actually use these products that get dumped into a spam folder? Frankly, yes - e-mail spamming is just cheap enough that if you buy a list of 10,000 names, and you somehow manage to sell one of whatever it is you are peddling, you can recoup your investment. The problem here isn’t that greedy capitalists want to use e-mail to sell things, it is that the companies developing lists are not being seriously required to keep people who want to be left alone off of these lists.

For instance, in order to be taken off of a list, spammers are required to give people the opportunity to be removed from lists. However, this removal process usually involves resubmitting your e-mail address to another form.

THAT is the catch: If you submit your e-mail address to a form saying, “please leave me alone,” spammers now have proof positive that there is a human being on the other side of that address. That it is not abandoned. They can then prove to customers that the addresses they are selling are active, checked e-mail addresses.

This is why you never want to actually use a spammer’s opt-out. Do not respond with “remove” in the title, do not enter your e-mail address and click enter… congress and the FTC have utterly failed you, so do not assume these things actually work.

Thankfully, e-mail receipt programs have a myriad of filtering programs to them, so most of these messages can be flushed away in short order. What I’m looking forward to seeing, however, are advanced e-mail ISP blocking, where my e-mail provider can see when things coming from a specific data center keep getting filtered as spam, so everything from there is suspect. This is done now, of course. I just want it to be done better.

It turns out that, like with virus program writers in the 90s, the government will not be able to help you avoid e-mail spam. This latest piece of news just backs that up.

Let’s face it. The economy is taking on the distinctive, sickly pallor of a post Mardi Gras Keith Richards, and even if we’re not officially in a recession, most economists believe it’s coming.

Generally, recessions hit the advertising business with the ferocity of a rabid wolverine, and the last one trimmed overall ad spending by 9% according to market researchers Veronis Suhler Stevenson. The wolverine in question mauled and devoured online advertising, which plummeted 27% over two years during the last recession.

This time it will be different. Not only will online marketing survive, it may actually thrive during the lean times, continuing its inexorable theft of ad spend from traditional media tactics.

Online is far more mature and proven now, and there are five specific reasons why it will be the go-to tactic among increasingly budget-conscious marketers.

Money Talks
First, online is typically less expensive than many other marketing tactics, and a sizable and impactful online effort can be undertaken more quickly and cost-effectively than can an offline campaign.

Wiggle Room
Like an Elizabeth Taylor marriage, online doesn’t require much long-term commitment. PPC ads can go up and down on a day-to-day basis. Email can be sent (or not sent) based on financial considerations. Even banner ads can usually be negotiated with an advantageous cancellation clause of 72 hours or so. Try that with your local TV station or newspaper. Other than keeping your Web site up to date, the only core online tactics that require substantial ongoing effort are organic search optimization, and Web site analytics and testing.

More Juice for the Squeeze
With diminished outbound marketing budgets, companies will shift focus toward increasing revenue from current customers, either through more frequent purchases, or larger ones. Email marketing is the perfect vehicle for communicating with customers and incentivizing additional purchases. Customer lifecycle marketing (persuasively combining email with direct mail, voice mail and text messaging) will gain favor as companies strive to close a higher percentage of a reduced flow of leads.

Waste Not
There is meaningful financial waste associated with advertising to people who have no interest in your product or service. The superior targeting ability of online marketing will enable companies to focus their reduced marketing dollars solely on likely prospects. This will accelerate the trend toward use of behavioral targeting and retargeting in online ad placement.

Behavioral targeting mines a person’s Web page visits and search terms to serve relevant ads. If a prospect reads several pages on Yahoo! about Nissan Altimas and does a search on Yahoo! using a related term, an ad for Valley Nissan dealers can be served up just in time.
Retargeting (a nascent industry led by local company Fetchback) takes the concept one step further, enabling companies to advertise only to people who have visited their Web site previously without making a purchase. With average conversion rates hovering around 2%, this is an ideal way to reach the other 98% that have taken the time to visit your site but haven’t yet converted.

Additionally, search marketing will continue to expand since it is the only tactic (other than Yellow Pages) that puts the marketer in the middle of the consumer’s purchase psychology funnel. I expect heavier bidding on specific, “long tail” search terms that often correlate with greater intent to purchase.

Numbers Don’t Lie
Online marketing of all types offers superior measurability and trackability in comparison to traditional tactics. This is of course due to the Orwellian nature of the Web, where every mouse click is tracked, usually anonymously. While the availability of this data may give you the same creepy feeling you get when gazing upon Joan Rivers, it makes for effective marketing.

When implemented correctly, banner ads, organic search, paid search, blogs and social media, email, lifecycle marketing and all other online marketing tactics provide a user by user scoreboard that can be utilized to ascertain precise return on investment metrics for each campaign.

In this way, online marketing provides companies the ability to test a wide array of tactics, evaluate which generates the best response, and then adjust the marketing program accordingly.

The old saying is “I know half my marketing dollars are wasted. I just don’t know which half.” This problem is even more acute and painful in a down economy when advertising dollars are curtailed. The inherent cost, targeting, and tracking advantages of online marketing make it more likely to succeed (or at least able to minimize losses from a failed campaign). And when a wolverine is at your door, that’s the type of assurance you want from your marketing strategy.

First of all I would like to thank my mom and dad for always being there…ok so it isn’t that kind of award, but recently Mighty Interactive won the Gold Consumer award from MarketingSherpa for a campaign we created on behalf of Kolbe Corp. The email used a 12 way multivariate test to determine which message and which price point would perform best for a national product launch for Kolbe’s new Career MO+ assessment tool.  We are now using the results from this test in our pay per click campaigns, and online media campaigns. Only 8 other Gold Consumer awards were given out globally.

To see all of the details of the campaign, and some of the results visit the award page.

Here is a full list of all award winners for the 2008 MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Awards.