Spam Report 7: Case Study profiling Adweek
Image by Eucalyp - The Noun Project
If you’re a marketer you will likely have read or heard of Adweek, correct? Yeah, me too. At one point I even had a shortcut in my Apple News app, which I rarely use nowadays. All news are ads, period.
Back to Adweek, out of the blue I received an email from Cindee Weiss, Production Director at Adweek. Don’t know her, never communicated with her, never signed up to anything from Adweek, as far as I know they are completely unknown to me.
I did my normal checking, which mail server, IP, domain etc. so I could report the domain. But nobody wanted to know, so I emailed Cindee and was astounded at her blatant response to my questions.
Not only do they make it a habit at Adweek to scan through profiles, no automation Cindee? I don’t think so and then they best guess the email address! You must be kidding! Someone is actually paid to do this, are you serious??
This is supposed to be a professional organisation, who are blatantly collecting data from the internet and then spamming people. I call it "The Ugly Internet" for a reason, everyone believes it is okay to cold email and it has gotten 100 no 1000 times worse since human beings came out of lockdown. Something definitely changed in the human psyche and it’s not pretty.
Not only are our social media feeds full of photos of people networking in person or attending award ceremonies, the same people, not true obviously, are spamming us!
When an organisation is abroad and spams me, there’s very little I can do about it, nobody wants the hassle. In addition everyone is hiding behind ‘legitimate interest’ and that’s basically what she was implying, if a spammer believes the recipient will be legitimately interested or works in the industry and therefore must be interested, albeit in their mind, it’s okay to spam, spam spam.
I am not even able to report the email to their legal team, although they suggest for me to email it as a EEA resident. Now I know we're left the EU, but we are still governed by GDPR.
At the time of writing I am emailing the acting CEO, which I understand to be Laura Held, Partner at Shamrock Capital Advisors. No idea if I will receive a response, normally it is ignored and brushed under the carpet, we’ll see, I will of course report back here if I get anything back.
Happy browsing on The Ugly Internet.
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