I know, huh. A message doesn’t have to be profound to be effective, and nowhere is this more true than in your spam folder. Spams are designed to work on the most visceral and immediate level of human communication. They have maybe one second to get their idea across. For this reason, it’s useful to study their communication strategies.
Like anyone participating in the Networked World, we get our share of spam at GameChangers. Here are some stats on the last 99 pieces of spam we’ve filtered:
54 of the spams were sex or porn-themed.
8 mentioned Paris Hilton.
16 claimed to have photos of Miley Cyrus Naked.
28 peddled pharmaceuticals.
20 of those peddling pharmaceuticals were related to male sexual potency.
2 were in Russian.
26 had grammar mistakes or misspellings in their messages.
11 promised hacks, cheat codes or online solutions like SEO and affiliate marketing platforms.
7 offered deals on travel.
8 were selling hard merchandise like electronics and machine guns.
12 offered music links.
14 associated nonsensical strings of words with their links. In most of these, I couldn’t tell what they were for.
15 were hybrids, offering combinations of the above characteristics.
No big surprises here. It’s the Cosmetic data you’d expect. What’s interesting about spam is the Emotional and Meta levels of communication.
On the Emotional level:
- A very strong overall theme in the 99 spams is male potency. On an emotional level, the idea of gaining powers, much like one would when playing an online RPG. Healing. Weaponry. Secrecy. Travel. Sexual prowess.
- There is a code to spam, a kind of language that gives it an insider’s appeal. This is language that speaks straight to the hearts of hackers, geeks and gamers everywhere.
- It all has a semi-illicit quality, as if the Russian mob might be running the show out of Brighton Beach by way of Kiev. What might one discover here that one might tell one’s friends? Spams are an invitation to explore the back alleys and sewers of the metaverse. And as we all know from tons of other media, some really interesting shit goes down in back alleys and sewers. Even if on a voyeuristic level, these environments have their appeal.
On the Meta-meaning level, here are some things the spam game conveys:
- However unconsciously, Disney abets the porn business with its Miley Cyrus brand.
- If you think straight, gay and bi are the only three designations we have for sexual preferences, you got another thing coming. Cross-dressing anime-themed transgendered Siberian nymphos are people too. Apparently.
- 13-15 year old males, 25-40 year old gamer geeks who live with their parents and dysfunctional middle-aged married men with erectile issues are the spammer bullseye demos. In terms of their sexual and emotional maturity, these demos are nearly identical.
- Soon we’ll be able to buy a lot more pharmaceuticals and other health services online.
- A generation of cyber criminals is out there cutting its hacker teeth, playing with toys that will one day become real weapons.
- The longer the tail, the less likely that the originator of the content is collecting rents from the ends of it. As we’ve seen with some musical acts like Prince, Pearl Jam and Radiohead, maybe that’s the idea.
- Paris Hilton’s star is fading. She is the new Pam Anderson. Look for Paris to announce her engagement to a fellow celeb or two within the year.
- Entrepreneurs take note: There is a global need for English lessons.
- Randomness is its own kind of language that speaks to the naturally curious.
- Your own network exposes itself to spam via other networks you belong to. At these intersections of networks, new lists get created. In the Networked World lists beget other lists on a biblical scale. Choose your networks wisely.
- A reformed and knowledgable spammer would make a good network marketing strategist for any brand.
And oh, yes, one more piece of meta-communication, this one encoded not in the spams themselves, but in my reading of them and writing about them. There is NO WAY I was going to go through 99 spams and parse them out in the detail that I describe above. It would have driven me mad. That is not who I am. Not my game. I’m not Josh Silver or Bill James or my son, Adam, who has eaten most of the breakfasts in his life using the sports stats pages of the newspaper as his place mat.
My game was this: I read through first 25 of the 99 spams, clipped four images, got an overall sense of what they were about, assigned categories, picked a number and multiplied by 4, then randomized that multiple up or down in some cases. The whole thing took maybe 15 minutes vs. the hours it would have taken me if I’d actually sorted through all 99. I suppose I could have called this post’25 Pieces of Spam on the Wall.’ But that would not have been me, either. For one thing, there were actually 99 spams in my spam folder, which is where I got the idea for the post. I wanted to honor that fact, as well as the drinking song, and my second-favorite Andy Kaufman routine (after ‘Mighty Mouse’) of all time, which involved him singing 99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall, and stopping with one Bottle left on the Wall, which drove audiences mad, and had the power to cause small riots in the clubs where he performed it. But that’s just me. Make your own games, with your own rules, and come to your own conclusions.
Tags: Communication, Cosmetic, Demo, Disney, Meta Meaning, Miley Cyrus, Paris Hilton, Pharmaceuticals, Porn, Russian, Sex, Spam