Off Target for Aqua Media

Updated with the company’s response. See below.

Aqua Media Direct has a new product called Deep Footprint that claims to use advanced behavioral targeting to learn exactly what products you’re interested in. At least that’s what they told me it does in that spam email they sent me.

That’s right, they’ve got this sophisticated targeting, but they’re using a spam blast to promote it. According to their email, they’d like to "determine whether 'Deep Footprint' Behavioral Targeting or any of our products will provide a solution to your media needs." When you look at my blog, do you see any media needs there?

The message even uses that fantastic "I’m your fake buddy" spam technique where they try and address you by name and use your email user name. So if they’d sent a message to FoobAR@example.com, the message would start "Dear FoobAR." Ah, the wonders of mail merge.

So, if you’re considering using Aqua Media Direct’s targeting features, you might find yourself wondering why they aren’t using it themselves. Or maybe they are and the targeting really is this bad.

Update (10pm Dec 4): Tom Doyle, CEO of Aqua Media apparently tried to comment, but the comment system here ate his comments. There’s a couple access attempts from his IP address to my comment system, but the comments never hit the MT database. He apparently decided his comments were being censored, because he wrote me...

Hello Adam,

Since you’ve made an issue of an errant email from a team member, I responded to your post and expect that the response will be seen on your site if “fair and balanced” is a concept that your blog maintains as you are a professional journalist.

Our company publicly apologized for the email error and we harbor no negative assessment of your freedom of expression.

Tom Doyle
CEO
aqua media direct

I poked around their web site and the news wires and I haven’t found a public apology or an explanation of what happened. Tom neglected to provide me with a link, so I’m a little in the dark about what they might have said in their apology.

I grabbed his IP address out of his email headers and looked it up in my server logs. Looks like someone tried to comment and it failed. I’m not sure why, but I figured I’d help him get his comment on the site. Despite Tom’s condescending tone throughout his email, I replied cordially and upbeat.

I don’t see any comments on that blog entry, but I checked the server log file and found two attempts to post a comment from the same IP address that you sent this email from. So I’m guessing something ate the comment.

Your IP address is on almost every anti-spam blacklist out there, but that’s not terribly unusual for IPs belonging to big cable ISPs like Charter. Ironic, though, isn’t it? That might be what’s keeping your comment from being posted. It shouldn’t, since I get plenty of other comments from blacklisted IPs, but if you look enough like a spambot, my comment system will ignore anything you say. Or you might have Javascript disabled—that will prevent comments from getting through.

You could try and post the comment again, perhaps from a different computer or IP address. Or email it to me and I’ll post it on your behalf.

Also, note that I’m not a professional journalist as you state. Just a tech entrepreneur who found the idea of an ad targeting company sending untargeted emails too funny to pass up. Admittedly, "fair and balanced" isn’t something I worry about on my personal blog. I usually go more for "snarky and opinionated."

I tried to explain to Tom what might have happened. I gently corrected his mistaken belief that I’m a professional journalist. I offered a couple of solutions, including one that would be sure-fire: email it to me and I’ll post it for you. Tom didn’t take me up on the offer, and instead descended into threats of lawsuits and incoherent ramblings.

Have a good evening, Adam. You have completely misinterpreted our email introduction sent to a proven database that you were erroneously included in.

The intended recipients were the agency planners and advertisers we already have relationships with.

It would be fair for you to update and correct your post to reflect the truth. If you want to maintain that we engage in spam, you are sorely mistaken and it will reflect on you if we pursue an investigation.

I don’t plan on anything more as we are too busy to waste time on this.

It’s unfortunate that your view relates to our ISP, which is in fact Charter, while our view is on the professional online industry that we’ve known since its inception.

All the best,

Tom Doyle
CEO
aqua media direct

Tom asks that I update this post to include the truth. So I’ve posted the entire correspondence I’ve had with him. That’s about as truthful as it can get.

It’s just that his explanation is fairly dismissive and doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. If it’s such a proven database of people they have existing relationships with, how did I end up in there? Where’d they get my email address, and why was it added into their Salesforce.com database? (They used Salesforce.com to send the original email.) I initially posted about this because I found it funny, but now I’d really like to know.

Tom takes issue with me calling this message spam, and even threatens "an investigation." Fine. It’s not spam. It’s a completely untargeted, unsolicited, mass email of a commercial nature from a company claiming to provide ad targeting services. Is that better?

I’m not really sure what Tom’s trying to say in his last paragraph, but it seems he might be concerned that I’m making disparaging remarks about Charter. I wasn’t, and was simply trying to explain to him why his communications might not be getting through.

It’s not uncommon for big cable and DSL ISPs to have their IP addresses on blacklists. IP addresses at big ISPs are a lot like public restrooms at a busy freeway offramp: they’re used by a lot of people, many of whom are not very clean. Some nasty signs up for an account, sends spam, get the IP blacklisted, and abandons the account. A few weeks later, it’s time for the ISP to assign you an IP address and you pick it up the blacklisted one from the random IP pool. The blame really lies two places. The ISP should do a better job of preventing their users from doing things that get them blacklisted, and the blacklist maintainers should probably be less aggressive about blacklisting dynamic IP addresses.