Turning Fans Into Spammers

from the now-there's-a-plan dept

Music label Word Records has chosen a ridiculous method of promoting the new Amy Grant album. They're running a contest for her fans on their website. The "contest" is that they will give free passes to whoever spams the most people with the press release about her new album. The more people you spam, the better your chances of winning. Any promotion that tells people to spam their friends (or, anyone) is a bad idea. It's not genuine marketing - it's stupid marketing. However, if they really wanted to do something like this, at the very least, they should have just made it a random drawing of people who passed it on - rather than whoever sends the "most". As it is, it's only encouraging people to pick up one of those "million email" spam CDs and spam everyone around. I wonder, if a spammer does spam people through this contest if Word Records could be held liable for breaking spam laws?
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  • identicon
    Phillip, 12 May 2002 @ 4:19pm

    Sponsored by the Sunday Times

    This week's Sunday Times features an enterprise seeking to raise capital to turn into a £100m valued company. The guy has developed software that crawls the web and builds bulk email lists which can then be sold to businesses. The ST paid for industries "top experts" to give advice on how to grow his business and gives all the details on how to invest in this exciting company in a growth market. Basically a spam merchant bent on making our lives that little more miserable. The Sunday has been one of the worst tabloids for a long time, they even reported in the same issue the 'Manbeef' human flesh spoof site as though it's probably real, but this is a new low for them.

    Phillip.

    link to this | view in chronology ]


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