A Little Lesson on “Spam”

As a digital marketer, my M.O. is to put pieces of content and/or messages in front of you folks, while trying to be as targeted and relevant as possible. When users who get served ads from reputable advertisers, I consistently hear the term to classify the message as: “Spam”. I see too much hatred in comments and I’m sick of it.

SPAM! Everything is spam. The billboard you see, the newspaper ads who didn’t ask if they could gaze at your eyeballs — are also spam! Don’t even get me started on those radio advertisements — ALSO SPAM! They didn’t ask if they could invade your precious eardrums.

According to the Internet Advertising Bureau, Spam is classified as:

The popular name for unsolicited commercial Email. However, some Email recipients define spam as any Email they no longer want to receive, even if it comes from a mailing list they joined voluntarily.

Spam is being put on an email list to sign up for Viagra (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Spam is millions of solicitation email lists I get put on daily by sales people that I’ve never met before. Spam is a violation of my privacy in the inbox.

The main goal of an advertiser, or digital marketer on the web, is to put meaningful messages in front of the right audiences at the right time — we hope. The noise in the industry appears to be a significant number of users feeling infringed when they see targeted ads within their Newsfeeds or other Social Media Platforms — knowing full well they do not pay to use this service (and never will if advertisers exist).

You may think social media is a necessary evil and of course, privacy rights come into play especially being a hot topic for Facebook.

All we, as advertisers, ask is that if you do not wish to see ads, you use the little toggle or ‘ad choices’ that appear on ALL Facebook, Google etc. sponsored content. The options will prompt you to “see less from this advertiser” or nothing at all. We ask that you remain calm and refrain from heavy freak outs on our ads that we have spent time on cultivating.

We are absolutely in no violation of Spamming you to high heaven if you use a service that has been up front that they support sponsored content and ads.

Think twice about your digital marketer and how they are trying to add relevant pieces of information to your newsfeed. Or don’t and choose to ignore in the right way.

Make life easy: toggle off.