A Spy By Any Other Name

Did you catch this article from the Washington Post earlier this week? Spyware Goes Legit? asks the headline... and the answer is no.

Reading the article one gets a disturbing sense of major advertisers looking for a kind of plausible deniability with regard to the possibly illegal, likely damaging to consumers, and certainly intrusive and irritating tactics used by their vendors.

I'm sure that some of the marketing managers quoted in the article had no idea this was going on, but shame on them. The potential brand damage from being associated with adware is too great to not be on top of this. Plus, using adware is just the wrong thing to do, and damages the overall advertising environment for everyone, as consumers decide that they're not going to click on ads, they're going to arm themselves with software to block ads, and delete every cookie on their PC.

Interestingly, I got a very slick piece of spam, total and utter spam, from Mercedes shortly after reading this article. There seems to be more problems in their online marketing house than they know - or will admit.