A new campaign by the restaurant chain Chipotle is using a common scourge - junk email - to make a point about its own fare and do some social good as well. The program is called "No Junk" and it is calling on people to forward their junk email to nojunk.
For every 100,000 messages received, Chipotle will donate $10,000 to The Lunch Box, a non-profit that provides resources to schools to make their food programs healthier. The "No Junk" campaign launched on June 25 and is slated to run through August, or until Chipotle reaches its goal of 500,000 junk e-mails received, for a maximum contribution of $50,000.
It's a clever tie in, Mashable writes, linking Chipotle's self-proclaimed healthy menu and the junk email that everyone has - it comprises 90% of all email now - and hates.
This theme - fighting back or defanging junk email by mocking it - is also part of a campaign by Cloudmark. The anti-spam software provider is encouraging users to share their spam in a new online video contest called "Show Us Your Spam," where users submit videos that depict the most interesting, unusual, funny or just plain annoying spam message they've received.
Submitted videos are to visually portray a spam message that a user has received, such as in this video, which Cloudmark developed to kick off the contest. Each video will be evaluated by public ratings and a panel of judges. The three finalists will be announced on August 2, 2010 and the winner announced on Monday, August 9.
Questionable Email Messages
Developers of these spam messages - most often illegal operations or from companies just skirting the edge of the law - should count themselves lucky with the Cloudmark and Chipolte campaigns as their messages are only being mocked. In a separate incident a sponsored email message sent from a newspaper caught the ire of many recipients, with the publication receiving the brunt of their anger. No, it wasn't - as in the examples above - unwanted spam. But the story, as the campaigns above do, illustrates the dangers of pushing readers too far with, in this case, aggressive messages.
According to the Read the Hook blog, an email sent to Daily Progress readers with the subject line: "Tell President Obama YOU Support Arizona’s Enforcement Law! –Paid Advertisement by NumbersUSA" was not well received.
"I don't like to be asked to support this from a news organization," says Zach Carter, a journalist who is economics editor for Alternet. (via Read the Hook). "It's not like they wrote a story about this and I disagreed." In an email he sent to the Progress, he asked, "Why are you sending me this ad asking me to endorse racism in Arizona?" Progress publisher Lawrence McConnell told the blog that "the response we've gotten so far indicated this did not meet expectations for email marketing." After evaluating a wave of comments, McConnell said the paper decided to reject in the future any email advertising of a political nature, either about candidates or issues."
