Spammer Chapter 2
By Bailey Armadale
In Palm Beach County, FL there is a stretch of road called Misery Mile. You will not find the road on any map, but if you ask around, plenty of people will know what you are talking about. The stretch of road containing Misery Mile is in one of the most affluent areas of South Florida and is the last place you would expect to have earned such a name. But the name does not reference the beautiful trees, golf courses and expensive homes in the area. Instead, it was dubbed Misery Mile because of several companies that have made their homes in the corporate office parks found scattered along the road. Many of these are direct marketers, companies that people curse on a daily basis, and still they managed to take root in a very exclusive area. For those of you who may not know, a direct marketer is more commonly known as a junk mailer and sends you hundreds of fliers, brochures, and special offers to your mail box each year. So it should come as no surprise that the email marketing industry made its home here, as well.
It was only logical that it should happen. The spam industry is the direct offspring of junk mail industry. During the late nineties, a small group of junk mailers realized that they could reach the same people to whom they sent hundreds of pieces of unwanted junk mail via the Internet and, in the process, save thousands of dollars by avoiding the costs of postage and printing. It was a simple idea and the results were impossible to argue with. As word got out among advertisers that they could reach their target market through email and save a great deal of money, the spammers flourished, and one of the men who profited the most was the owner of my company.
The owner started an email marketing company with several other men in the late 90's that would eventually go on to be the single biggest spam house in North America. However, the owner was such a loathsome being that even his partners could not stand him, and eventually they bought him out for a little over a million dollars. With that money, he set off to start his own company, the Evil Email Company -- a venture that allowed him to continue making money off of email, but still have plenty of time for his outside interests, namely infidelity and cocaine.
My first impression of the owner was not positive -- nor was my second, my third, or any other impressions I would later have of him. I had worked for The Evil Email Company for about two weeks before I finally met him. When I was hired as a sales assistant, meeting the new guy was not exactly a high priority for The owner, but the company was still small enough that everyone knew everyone else in the office from the owner down to the receptionist, so in time I would get my chance. Before I met him, words like "pioneer" and "genius" were thrown around when other employees described him, and many went so far as to call him the most brilliant man in the entire industry. So when I finally met him, I was disappointed to say the least.
The owner was unspectacular in every sense of the word. He was a homely and slightly overweight man who stood a towering 5'7". At age 35, he looked 50. His rapid aging was the result of a combination of his entrepreneurial spirit and a lifestyle that would have Scott Weiland saying "slow down." I would not know this until several months later at his birthday party, where I spent the rest of the night asking others, "Is he really only in his thirties?" His first words to me were actually just a grunt and a nod before he went into his office. There he remained for the rest of the day. As a new employee, I was a bit disappointed that I would not get a chance to impress the owner of my company and get to knowhim. Later on, I learned that getting to know The owner was actually very easy as long as you were willing to go to the bar across the street where he would spend several hours each day after work running up the company's tab.
The owner's greatest contribution to email marketing is the single most devious and sneakiest trick in an industry that prides itself on finding new ways to trick people. For years, email marketers were looking for a quick and easy way to add new email addresses to their databases. The more recipients you could mail, the more money you could make, but collecting the names took a lot of time. Buying the addresses was easy enough, but just simply using someone else's database as your own was illegal, even if you paid for it. Challenged by this, the owner managed to find a gray area and with it he created a process that would make him millions of dollars. It was called the permission pass.
The permission pass is a simple system designed to legally increase the size of a company's mailable database without letting the recipient realize they have just opted-in to receive more e-mail. An email is sent out to a person with a generic offer for a vacation special or debt consolidation or anything that would not really interest the recipient, but would not offend them either. It would be the kind of email that most people would just look at for two seconds and then delete. However if they scrolled to the bottom of the email, there is a message in very small print with verbiage that tells the recipient that they are being added to a new mailing list, and unless they respond to this email with a message saying they did not want to join, they would start receiving advertisements and offers immediately. Since most people delete the email before they even bother reading the entire message, the permission pass successfully generated extremely high rates of new usable email addresses.
If the owner bought a list of 1 million email addresses and used this permission pass, he would easily end up with 99% of the names legally his. It was brilliant, and best of all it was totally legal. As long as you received that email and did not respond to it, you were automatically a new target. The model was quickly noticed by other email companies and was adopted by all of them. It was the perfect way to add a couple million new members to your lists without the bother of taking the time to convince people to knowingly subscribe. The process is now illegal as set forth by rules in the "Canned Spam Act," but for several years this model was responsible for millions of people getting added to new lists on a daily basis.
If the owner was known for something even more than the permission pass, it was how hard he partied. Few people in the email industry were saints. One of other early spammers in the area was a former drug dealer and had served several years in prison. Others had backgrounds in porn and other industries that you would not tell your parents you worked in. But the owner somehow managed to put many of them to shame with his lifestyle, and more impressively got the company to soak up all the costs. The perfect example of this is how our company came to be one of the local Marriot's best customers.
In any given week, the owner would spend about half his time in the office. The other half would be spent at a bar across the street drinking himself stupid and/or trying to pick up women. Despite being married and extremely unattractive, The owner still managed to do pretty well for himself, and when he had no luck at the bar he could always come back to the office and dip his pen in the company ink. Whoever he picked up though would inevitably end up with him at the Marriot for the afternoon, the evening, or sometimes up until the next day depending on whom he was with and if our company's corporate drug dealer had made a recent visit. Once he returned to the office he would hand the receipt to the accountant and have her file under entertaining expenses.
Once the trips to Marriot reached over $10,000, our poor accountant had enough and we had to find a way to curtail his expenses. Eventually, our top salesman was brought in to work out a deal with the Marriot so that we would have a permanently reserved room that was good whenever he needed it at a much discounted rate. When the deal was done, the owner was so happy he took the salesman out to lunch to a strip club that offered a free buffet and that was the last we saw of either of them that day.
Once again, the owner was setting the model for both the industry and his employees.
Read Spammer Chapter 1 HERE.
Check back for Chapter 3 Tomorrow and 4 on Friday.
Monday I have a gruesome and beautiful story by a New York Cop.
Read indy comic hot shot Jeffrey Brown's story HERE.
Or Check out Becca Costello's madcap adventure with dolphins in Gay Hawaii HERE.
And of course all of my own work tales are HERE!
In Palm Beach County, FL there is a stretch of road called Misery Mile. You will not find the road on any map, but if you ask around, plenty of people will know what you are talking about. The stretch of road containing Misery Mile is in one of the most affluent areas of South Florida and is the last place you would expect to have earned such a name. But the name does not reference the beautiful trees, golf courses and expensive homes in the area. Instead, it was dubbed Misery Mile because of several companies that have made their homes in the corporate office parks found scattered along the road. Many of these are direct marketers, companies that people curse on a daily basis, and still they managed to take root in a very exclusive area. For those of you who may not know, a direct marketer is more commonly known as a junk mailer and sends you hundreds of fliers, brochures, and special offers to your mail box each year. So it should come as no surprise that the email marketing industry made its home here, as well.
It was only logical that it should happen. The spam industry is the direct offspring of junk mail industry. During the late nineties, a small group of junk mailers realized that they could reach the same people to whom they sent hundreds of pieces of unwanted junk mail via the Internet and, in the process, save thousands of dollars by avoiding the costs of postage and printing. It was a simple idea and the results were impossible to argue with. As word got out among advertisers that they could reach their target market through email and save a great deal of money, the spammers flourished, and one of the men who profited the most was the owner of my company.
The owner started an email marketing company with several other men in the late 90's that would eventually go on to be the single biggest spam house in North America. However, the owner was such a loathsome being that even his partners could not stand him, and eventually they bought him out for a little over a million dollars. With that money, he set off to start his own company, the Evil Email Company -- a venture that allowed him to continue making money off of email, but still have plenty of time for his outside interests, namely infidelity and cocaine.
My first impression of the owner was not positive -- nor was my second, my third, or any other impressions I would later have of him. I had worked for The Evil Email Company for about two weeks before I finally met him. When I was hired as a sales assistant, meeting the new guy was not exactly a high priority for The owner, but the company was still small enough that everyone knew everyone else in the office from the owner down to the receptionist, so in time I would get my chance. Before I met him, words like "pioneer" and "genius" were thrown around when other employees described him, and many went so far as to call him the most brilliant man in the entire industry. So when I finally met him, I was disappointed to say the least.
The owner was unspectacular in every sense of the word. He was a homely and slightly overweight man who stood a towering 5'7". At age 35, he looked 50. His rapid aging was the result of a combination of his entrepreneurial spirit and a lifestyle that would have Scott Weiland saying "slow down." I would not know this until several months later at his birthday party, where I spent the rest of the night asking others, "Is he really only in his thirties?" His first words to me were actually just a grunt and a nod before he went into his office. There he remained for the rest of the day. As a new employee, I was a bit disappointed that I would not get a chance to impress the owner of my company and get to knowhim. Later on, I learned that getting to know The owner was actually very easy as long as you were willing to go to the bar across the street where he would spend several hours each day after work running up the company's tab.
The owner's greatest contribution to email marketing is the single most devious and sneakiest trick in an industry that prides itself on finding new ways to trick people. For years, email marketers were looking for a quick and easy way to add new email addresses to their databases. The more recipients you could mail, the more money you could make, but collecting the names took a lot of time. Buying the addresses was easy enough, but just simply using someone else's database as your own was illegal, even if you paid for it. Challenged by this, the owner managed to find a gray area and with it he created a process that would make him millions of dollars. It was called the permission pass.
The permission pass is a simple system designed to legally increase the size of a company's mailable database without letting the recipient realize they have just opted-in to receive more e-mail. An email is sent out to a person with a generic offer for a vacation special or debt consolidation or anything that would not really interest the recipient, but would not offend them either. It would be the kind of email that most people would just look at for two seconds and then delete. However if they scrolled to the bottom of the email, there is a message in very small print with verbiage that tells the recipient that they are being added to a new mailing list, and unless they respond to this email with a message saying they did not want to join, they would start receiving advertisements and offers immediately. Since most people delete the email before they even bother reading the entire message, the permission pass successfully generated extremely high rates of new usable email addresses.
If the owner bought a list of 1 million email addresses and used this permission pass, he would easily end up with 99% of the names legally his. It was brilliant, and best of all it was totally legal. As long as you received that email and did not respond to it, you were automatically a new target. The model was quickly noticed by other email companies and was adopted by all of them. It was the perfect way to add a couple million new members to your lists without the bother of taking the time to convince people to knowingly subscribe. The process is now illegal as set forth by rules in the "Canned Spam Act," but for several years this model was responsible for millions of people getting added to new lists on a daily basis.
If the owner was known for something even more than the permission pass, it was how hard he partied. Few people in the email industry were saints. One of other early spammers in the area was a former drug dealer and had served several years in prison. Others had backgrounds in porn and other industries that you would not tell your parents you worked in. But the owner somehow managed to put many of them to shame with his lifestyle, and more impressively got the company to soak up all the costs. The perfect example of this is how our company came to be one of the local Marriot's best customers.
In any given week, the owner would spend about half his time in the office. The other half would be spent at a bar across the street drinking himself stupid and/or trying to pick up women. Despite being married and extremely unattractive, The owner still managed to do pretty well for himself, and when he had no luck at the bar he could always come back to the office and dip his pen in the company ink. Whoever he picked up though would inevitably end up with him at the Marriot for the afternoon, the evening, or sometimes up until the next day depending on whom he was with and if our company's corporate drug dealer had made a recent visit. Once he returned to the office he would hand the receipt to the accountant and have her file under entertaining expenses.
Once the trips to Marriot reached over $10,000, our poor accountant had enough and we had to find a way to curtail his expenses. Eventually, our top salesman was brought in to work out a deal with the Marriot so that we would have a permanently reserved room that was good whenever he needed it at a much discounted rate. When the deal was done, the owner was so happy he took the salesman out to lunch to a strip club that offered a free buffet and that was the last we saw of either of them that day.
Once again, the owner was setting the model for both the industry and his employees.
Read Spammer Chapter 1 HERE.
Check back for Chapter 3 Tomorrow and 4 on Friday.
Monday I have a gruesome and beautiful story by a New York Cop.
Read indy comic hot shot Jeffrey Brown's story HERE.
Or Check out Becca Costello's madcap adventure with dolphins in Gay Hawaii HERE.
And of course all of my own work tales are HERE!
1 Comments:
At 1:43 PM, Phelpsy said…
Ohh, these stories are as good as Keiths
I'm so glad I find the time here at work to check these out.
I've been entertaing the thought of getting a story for you As well, seeing as I do the whole Tech Support thingover the phone. I have many stories... But I'm lazy
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