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Who Knew?

E-Mail Hucksterism, Offensive but Effective

Who knew that those spam e-mail messages promising to enhance male performance actually got response?

Of course, we know direct marketing is a numbers game. Throw a few million messages touting an herbal concoction's ability to turn a guy into Don Juan, and, even if just a small percentage of them lead to a sale, it's easy to turn a profit if your markup allows you make $47.50 per bottle and you can send your messages at little or no cost.

Sure, the companies who supply these "vitamins" say they don't tolerate the use of Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (UCE) to promote their products, yet readily admit that it's easy for anyone with moderate technical skills to make themselves virtually anonymous.

According to today's article in the New York Times, suppliers admit that the use of UCE is easy to conceal:

"But as Congress considers laws to crack down on spam, the decentralized structure of the e-mail marketing industry shows how difficult the task will be. Most pill makers, like Eye Five, sell their products indirectly, through thousands of independent affiliates, a technique pioneered online by Amazon.com. A dozen affiliates can end up mailing the same message to similar lists of e-mail addresses, confounding millions of computer users, including women, with multiple copies of messages both inappropriate and unwanted.

The spammers are generally very small outfits, which hide their identities by bouncing their messages off computers in countries with lax regulation. The pill makers are more visible, defending themselves by insisting that they have strict policies against spamming by affiliates. They concede, though, that spammers often evade those policies.

"It is impossible for us to control the marketing of all aspects of our products," Mr. Gerstein said."

Wonder how Amazon likes having its affiliate program compared to performance enhancement offers in the New York Times?

Unfortunately, even as the calls for regulation of UCE continue to appear, it's apparent that spam cannot be stopped by legislation. Money, technical and personnel resources to enforce UCE laws are lacking, and, as mentioned in the article, enforcement of laws is difficult when the law is broken off-shore. Also, returns for the items are low, and consumer lawsuits over them are also virtually non-existent. After all, what guy wants to stand up in court and admit that he not only ordered the pills, but that they didn't even work?

If, as the article mentions, the biggest spammers can make $5,000 to $10,000 per day from these offers, it's clear that there is only one way to stop them, and that's to hit them where it hurts -- in the wallet. Either a model needs to develop to capture fees for the distribution of UCE, or people need to stop buying these pills.

Guess size does matter, after all...