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You lost me at "built a solid digital agency team", and you're using euphemisms instead of just saying "spam". There's nothing solid or legitimate about what th

You lost me at "built a solid digital agency team", and you're using euphemisms instead of just saying "spam". There's nothing solid or legitimate about what they were doing.

zem 13y ago
hacker news in general seems to have an uneasy relationship with the line between "digital marketing" and "spam". possibly because aggressive email marketing campaigns really do pay off for startups, regardless of how many people they annoy in the process.
- ericd 13y ago
  They do in the short term, but in the much harder to measure long term, I'm guessing that they do more damage than good. I know many people who absolutely abhor and refuse to ever use LinkedIn thanks to their incredibly aggressive email team, for example, but I'm sure the engagement numbers looked real good when they sent out each of those email blasts.
AJ007 13y ago
If "weight loss product, colon cleanser and green coffee supplement" are what they are marketing, a better "harsh" word would be deceptive. Not only are they marketing deceptive products, they were too stupid to do it successfully and now their merchant accounts are frozen. I choose the word stupid because there is a strong history of the FTC going after other companies selling these exact same products in this manner since about 2009. (The biggest being Jesse Willms, $359m http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2012/02/willms.shtm http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2012/02/willms.shtm) So, yes, Skymall & its original owners got scammed.