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R U Ready 4 IM Spam? |
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By Jimmy Guterman
On the Net, media and marketing companies are like the stormtroopers in the original Star Wars. They find a means of distribution, suck out its value until there's nothing left, and move on to the next one. Usenet is gone as a useful distribution medium, thanks to incessant spam. Unwanted e-mail advertising is such a plague that an entire industry is coalescing around the development of tools that filter it out. And website ads are getting so intrusive (pop-ups, unnaturally large ads, interstitials, and all flavors of dancing baloney) that many people I know turn off all images on their browsers. They'll skip some useful and entertaining stuff because the unwanted material is so annoying or offensive. [more...]
The stormtroopers of marketing may be about to strike again. Their target this time: instant messaging.
It's easy to see why. Research firm Gartner estimates that 66 million people use the three most popular programs (AIM, MSN, and Yahoo (YHOO)). All those vendors sell "secure" versions for corporate use, and IBM (IBM), to name just one provider of corporate IM services, reports that 7 million people are using its Sametime system. At companies for which e-mail isn't fast enough, instant messaging has become the preferred form of online communication.
Tens of millions of customers using an extremely intrusive online application? That's a marketer's dream. We've already seen interesting -- and far from annoying -- attempts to use IM programs as a new means of media distribution. Some have been provocative and amusing, like Aimster. Others, like a news service from the Wall Street Journal, have sought to use instant messaging to distribute the sort of information (headlines, stock quotes, etc.) that we're used to seeing in e-mail and on webpages.
What makes the current generation of services seem promising to those who don't want their screens full of IM ad windows is that no material is distributed unless it's asked for. Some material is now pushed at IM users -- like the banner ads that appear when consumers log on to AIM -- but it's nothing like the tangle of pop-ups and pop-unders so many media websites now deliver.
Source: Business 2.0
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