THE BEGINNINGS OF EMAIL ADVERTISING
Imagine sending out a million letters for less than the cost of airing one late night infomercial in Memphis. Now imagine that whether you want them there or not, half your letters wind up in places like Finland, Tahiti, and Lebanon. And the vast majority go to people who don't want them. Well, you probably don't need to imagine. You've probably gotten enough unsolicited email ads to know.
Real Internet commerce started in 1994, when two Arizona immigration lawyers, Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel, sent out advertisements to every single discussion group on the Internet, regardless of its topic. Canter and Siegel were met with threats of legal action and even death. But guess what? Email advertising is now here to stay.
Canter and Siegel went on to form a company specializing in mass Internet mailings. An awful lot of people were angry at their approach, but it seemed that enough were interested (and responded) to make it profitable. It also seemed to help that their specialty, immigration law, was something of interest to hard-to-reach readers in foreign countries who had few other ways of contacting the firm.
At first, we thought the story ended there. In fact, we were all set to call Canter and Siegel to get some juicy quotes on how profitable it can be to send millions of emails around the world. But the story wasn't nearly that simple. Turns out that the law firm's Phoenix phone was disconnected. For that matter so was their Web site. All this, of course, made us wonder. Did Canter and Siegel ever actually make a profit? We really don't know. But a disconnected phone is never the sign of a promising business.
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