Saturday 19 April 2008

The Media is Bored with Spam?

bored catI moderated a Ferris Research webinar earlier this week. It was intended to be a press-only event, to support a client's press release. Inevitably with these things, a few non-press register, but that's perfectly OK.

The client is a new spam filter vendor, that seems to have an interesting new twist on the problem (I'm reasonably convinced that it's not just a silly FUSSP).

The thing that really surprised me was how few press people turned up. In fact, non-press outnumbered the press folks two-to-one. What's up with that?

I also heard from the client's PR person (hi, Donna) that nobody has anything spam-related on their editorial calendars.

Doesn't the mainstream media care about spam any more? Certainly their readers do, as evidenced by the continuing churn in the spam filtering marketplace.

Any thoughts? Click the comments link below: I'm all ears.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's pretty simple, really. Imagine a technology writer going to his editor, "Hey, there's this company with an anti-spam product..."

Editor: So? Another one?

Writer: Yeah, but this is supposed to be different.

Editor: They all are, otherwise there'd only be one company. Will users notice anything extraordinary?

Writer: Well, it's supposed to get rid of more spam...

Editor: [yawns]

Anonymous said...

The media isn't bored with spam. They are bored with new random companies coming along releasing products which they claim will solve the spam problem, but don't.

Even if the new product is a magic bullet (yeah, right!) then the press isn't going to just take the companies word for it when every other vendor claims exactly the same thing.

Anonymous said...

I just checked the MyEdcals database for stories related to Spam. Out of the 400,000 stories for 2008/2009 in the database, 2 are targeting spam. It's an old issue that doesn't have much teeth anymore.

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