Idiotic spam (parental discretion advised)
Hello,
Try this revolutionary product, CIALIS Soft Tabs.
Cialis Soft Tabs is the new impotence treatment drug that everyone is talking about. Soft Tabs acts up to 36 hours, compare this to only two or three hours of Viagra action! The active ingredient is Tadalafil, same as in brand Cialis.
Simply dissolve half a pill under your tongue, 10 min before sex, for the best erections you’ve ever had!
Soft Tabs also have less sidebacks (you can drive or mix alcohol drinks with them). No prior prescription needed.
You can get it at: [url removed]
Aside from the grammatical problems, there are a couple things that are just not right about the above spam message I recently received.
The first is that soft tabs seem difficult to cut in half. But supposing you actually manage to cut the things, it must be even harder to save the juicy bits from the second half for use later. Oh spammer, why not just make smaller pills?
The second is a problem of marketing. If someone is interested in obtaining the “best erections [he’s] ever had” lasting “up to 36 hours”, he sure as hell isn’t going to want anything called “Cialis Soft Tabs”. Come on, people. This impotent but yearning hypothetical man, this member of a readily exploitable demographic intent on a cure is going to want “Hard Tabs”. Or “Big Tabs”. Or, if he’s into that whole alliteration thing, “Turgid Tabs”. But “Soft”?
Please.
Maybe I should go into the marketing business peddling snake oil wares promising to reduce erectile dysfunction. Or maybe I should just hit the delete button faster.
You know what would be an interesting experiment? Set up a few trash email accounts, distribute each email address in exactly one fashion, and see how much spam each account accumulates.
For instance, one could be distributed via Usenet; another could be used to sign up for a mailing list that is known to sell email addresses to spammers; one could be printed in plain text on a website.
I know there isn’t much control of the experiment, and the outcome would be dependent on which newsgroup, which mailing list, or which website you put the address on, but I’ve been curious in some general sense which of those means of obtaining an email address is most common for spammers to use.
I suppose you could make it a race, and use a spam gourmet address for each account with, say, a threshold of 10, and see which address accumulates 10 emails the quickest.
Marketers – Ha! The one close encounter I ever had with them involved me and the other minions of Billy Dead Flag being roped into a promo campaign for Deep Riverrock in Dublin.
Ad execs from the company that hired us fell into the macho yuppie type who was trying to impress the clients and kept striding in looking pissed we weren’t all organised yet. Which was tricky because the other type of Ad exec was this inanely grinning miss who shoved shit lines and costumes at us and made like we were primary school kids.
The two agency girls stood around like gombeens then twittered on about the costumes while we, the hirelings, sorted everything out and figured out how the inflatable motorised giant bottle worked, stuffed a poor sap inside and got *their project* rolling.
All that I can forgive, it is after all not their forte – doing the fiddly bits of what was essentially street theatre. I can even forgive the dire lack of initiative and general helplessness from women who are supposed to be liberated ball-breaking professionals – 21st Century women FFS! – all that I can let slide, but the quality of material they gave us, the meat and drink of their goddamn *JOBS*, on an account for COCA-COLA who’s budget for adverts should inspire trembling awe among hapless advert agencies, that I cannot let slide.
They gave us shit. It was ‘I wrote this on a coffee break ’cause I’d forgotten to’. It was not-done homework quality. The kind of thing you dash off while the teachers working their way down the far side of the class. I could have done better and I’m a goddamn engineer – a multi-classed Physicist FFS! Billy Dead Flags, a serious musician, architect and creative type could have trounced their feeble efforts over a lunch break with two of us as sounding boards. Weddingfinger Sam, or the amazing Dor’ both of whom are dedicated composer/playwright types, I fear for what either would have done to those useless girls. Hell, Savage, whos ‘of the industry’ would have cleaned the floor with them without dislodging his toothpick.
But, and this is the ultimate offence to my sense of justice and propriety – they were *AWASH WITH F*”$^NG MONEY!* macho yuppie peeled off and tossed us a stack of twenties for what little we did.
I swear to god, if this was a meritocracy, I could pick a halfdozen of my friends from secondary school and we would crush any similarly sized agency – assuming what we saw is indicative. I find it hard to believe I knew a fluke class of talents, so if anyone can do this.. how can such a shower of twits survive in the market?
Though it does explain why we get such bullshit ad campaigns.
/vent