Miller Brewing getting their spam through, regardless (and extreme mousing)

In today's IT Blogwatch, we look at Miller Brewing getting their spam through. Not to mention extreme mousing ...

Miller Brewing doesn't let customer's get out of their clutches that easily. As Cory Doctorow reported at Boing Boing on Saturday,  "Regina sez, 'I filled out a web form for a contest from Miller using a throwaway junk email address and then, months after I dumped the throwaway account, I got this to my main account! Not sure I like the idea of companies tracking me down like this.'" [Cory includes a link to the actual email from Miller's.]

» Eric Weaver, Ad-Verse:  "How'd they do that? I did a little research on the email address...the domain name, customer-contact.net, is owned by Equifax, the credit reporting agency. So ... Miller is using credit records to hunt you down for unsolicited direct marketing efforts? How sociopathic is that?!? ... Brian McWilliams, author of SpamKings, had the same idea I did and put out a brilliant expose about it ... Here's my question: what exactly has driven marketers like us to stalk our prospects or harass our customers? What's made it appropriate to drown them in unwanted paper, or change their email addresses, or even to use their credit records to hunt them down for a spam campaign ... I see two trends here. My guess is that Miller CEO Norman Adami, and Doug Brodman, SVP Sales/Distribution, are likely putting massive pressure on Tom Long, Miller CMO, to raise market share ... Rather than making Miller a "pull" brand, they're going to push it on you, even if they have to track your sorry, opt-out ass down through your .. credit records ... This trend, a short-term, hellbent focus on quarterly numbers, is driving many big brands to embrace sociopathic practices and abuse their customer relationships for the sole purpose of hitting a number ...  A rejection of fluff and corporate financial goals at the customers' expense. You see it more and more. Your customers DO NOT WANT intrusion, interruption, nor to be stalked by big brand budgets. Your needs are not more important than their own, CMOs, and they can see through the smarmy stock photography and legal-safe copy. After years of these practices, many of us are dead to it now and take it as a part of our daily lives ... I want my colleagues to try a different kind of "insanity": to focus on building an attracting, relevant, compelling brand rather than forcing a shitty one under customers' noses at every turn. I want us to CREATE PULL ... I want marketers and management teams to conclude that self-serving sociopathy and customer abuse are WRONG." [Here, here I'm sure plenty would agree.]

» Chris Hoofnagle, EPIC West:  "Over at Adrants, Steve Hall hypothesizes that Miller must have used some type of IP tracking to find Regina. That sounds like too much work to me.
I think Regina was discovered through one of the many growing "Email Change of Address" (ECOA) databases. In some cases, individuals deliberately sign up for services like Returnpath, which allows the individual to tell the world that their e-mail has changed ... For instance, Experian offers ECOA, noting that its database of online contacts contains 100 million e-mail addresses (PDF). Similarly, Infousa claims to have a database of over 70 million e-mail addresses and ECOA services through affiliates like Yesmail ... I suspect that these companies obtain the information through affiliate sharing agreements. You know, those partnerships with corporate "families" that are described in privacy policies as 'efforts to serve you better by providing you information about products and services that our trusted partners offer and you want whether you know it or not.' ... Congress and the FTC need to explore the vast network of companies that drive these forms of annoyance--the list brokers. These companies buy and sell your personal information and hide their practices from the public. They are not subject to any specific state or federal privacy regime. And in some cases, they have sold personal information to scammers."

» Tim Nudd, Adfreak: "Miller Brewing doesn’t like it when you play one of their online games and give them a false e-mail address. It’s just insulting. In fact, chances are they will respond by hunting you down ...  if you really didn’t want to opt in, you shouldn’t have been having any fun on Miller’s Web site to begin with."

» Mike, Techdirt:  "It's pretty common, at this point, for most people to have their "junk email" address. That's the email address you use whenever you have to register for anything online. You know it's going to get spammed ... If marketers were smart (stop laughing), they'd recognize just how little value someone's email address is for this very reason. Instead, we see them doing things like setting up tradeoffs if you choose to not let them spam you ... In other words, there may actually be people associated with Miller Brewing trying to hunt down your real email address, if you ever gave them a junk one. They then provide an opt-out if the person doesn't want to keep receiving messages. It would be nice if there were a little more evidence that this was happening for real -- but, if it's true, then it's more ridiculous marketer short-sightedness, designed more to harm a brand in the long run ... Apparently, Equifax used to have a spamming operation, which they claimed they shut down right before CAN SPAM went into effect... however, this seems to be associated with the domains owned by that company. Remember, this is the same Equifax who recently said it was un-American for you to know what Equifax knew about you."

» Flyairdave: "Miller Brewing must have a lot of extra time on their hands ... It is weird that Miller Brewing would take the time to track down customers that used a throwaway e-mail account and contact them in their main account. This is bound to p.. off some customers."

Buffer overflow:

• Andrew Clifford: System governance: defining criteria in detail
  
• Ben Edelman: Nonconsensual 180 Installations Continue, Despite 180's "S3" Screen
• Eric Bangeman: US government may outlaw rootkits
• Chris J. Breisch: Not All Bugs Are Worth Fixing
• Techdirt: Ma Bell Looks To Stomp Out Net Neutrality World Wide
• Techdirt: Reasons Why Online Anonymity Is Important: Whistle Blowing And ID Theft
• Andrew Clarke: Hacking Oracle using Google Fu
• Drunken Data: You say ILM, He says DLM ...
• Richi Jennings: What brand owners should do about phishing
• George Ou: Busting the myths of Email outsourcing
• Martin McKeay: (ISC)2 Dinner: Workforce Study
• Heidi Biggar: De-duping continued …

 And finally:  Extreme mousing

Richi Jennings is an independent technology and marketing consultant, specializing in email, blogging, Linux, and computer security. A 20 year, cross-functional IT veteran, he is also an analyst at Ferris Research. Contact Richi at blogwatch@richi.co.uk. Also contributing to today's post: Judi Dey, our very own Antipodean.