Fast Company: The Dirty Little Secret About Spam

If Andy Sernovitz were already in his grave, he'd be spinning, but as it is now he's just hopping-up-and-down mad. Sernovitz has made it his personal mission to rid the world of spam, but he says he does it only reluctantly:

"The fact that the industry can't get its testicles out of its pocket to do something about it is an embarrassment. It's a tragedy that I have to do this myself."

I first met Andy in 1997, when he had just started what became the Association for Interactive Marketing, then an independent political action committee dedicated to heading off boneheaded Internet legislation. He was fervent then, and he appears now in this Fast Company story to be even more so now.

Sernovitz believes mainstream advertisers don't recognize the level of threat allowed by their tolerance for spam-allowing policies. He has an apocalyptic vision of the online marketing industry consumed whole by these spam fires it has started.

That the Direct Marketing Association (DMA), the new owner of his brainchild, quashed AIM's recent effort to develop reasonable email marketing guidelines should be enough to send him into fits. His own offspring, the effort to bring reason to the industry, betrayed him. Sernovitz speaks as a man shorn of his son, still married to the purpose.