CNN Guerrilla Spam
Click here for the full summery of this story. This node is reserved for old notes.
Update: 4/20 7:17AM: NYTimes 2/14/05: CNN Sent Out Targeted Comments and Messages (a.k.a. spam)
The New York Times reported that CNN's public information division actually carried out a targeted response (or spams, depending on how you look at it) to the mob of bloggers attacking Eason Jordan: (read full post)
Update: 420 6:30AM: 3/18 Marketwatch: A Business Context for the CNN Guerrilla Spam
Jon Friedman writes on CNN's attention to bloggers:
CNN is trying something -- anything -- to help it create a buzz. The Time Warner (TWX: news, chart, profile) unit, in its never-ending quest to establish an identity that will enable the network to topple arch-rival Fox News (FOX: news, chart, profile) , is betting that enough people will gravitate to the new show[Inside the Blogs].
Update: 4 New Spams Found (4/19)
Update: Spams 2,3: http://stupidevilbastard.com/index/seb/comments/5143/#c30100 My friends we have case #2 of CNN spam. And what's this? I do believe its case #3: http://www.thesakeofargument.com/archives/001084.html (4/18)
Initial Conclusion:
This spam is a form of guerrilla marketing that is designed to minimize the amount of damage the blogosphere can have on a brand. The guerrilla marketer's rifle is a piece of spam... the spam contains 3 items, a casually written comment from a "real" person[1], and a news article about the product that might leave either information or a more positive impression about the brand. But this part of the spam is actually the Guerrilla's second line of defense against an opinion that might hurt the image of their brand.
1. There exists a possibility that they use this "real" person to exploit people's reluctace to censor.
These guerrilla's are -- in fact -- not trying to improve their brand's image. Rather, they are trying to limit the amount of information that might tarnish their brand's image. Thus, they include a string keywords that are generated to oversaturate the the keywords on the page, and therefore give most search engine's the impression that someone is trying to boost their page rank by using the oldest trick in the book: keyword stuffing. Almost every search engine will punish stuffing keywords severely. When successful, they've achieved a solid business-driven goal: minimizing the amount of information that might tarnish the public's perception of their brand.
Although the spam I received was clearly in CNN's favor, I have no proof. And I think that the marketers know that they are in the clear, regardless of the fact that it points so obviously to CNN.
This new strategy has a number of advantages:
1. For the most part, bloggers do not pay attention to old content, so if they leave a spam on a month old post, most likely, the blogger will never notice that it no longer brings in traffic. And, if the keywords don't work, at least they have their message to cancel out the negative effect of the post in question
2. Its cost effective, all they have to do is surf google looking for blog posts that have a negative opinion of their brand, and then drop the guerrilla message, and the search terms. The entire process takes only a minute, and could be done by a contractor who is not connected to them in anway for very little money.
3. Where as most spam will cause trouble for the spammer, this sort of spam has one key advantage. Its targeted, and directly relates to the content; thus, for "CNN" the marketers could make a significant impact, and leave less than 25 spams all together. Although the tactic will make bloggers angry, the marketers know that the majority of the public won't even understand how it works, or care. In addition, the marketers can always argue: "Look, you have open comments, and its your responsibility to protect them; we're just giving you our opinion, and show me the money you have for that attorney if you don't like it".
4. The marketers do not have to make a sales pitch, and no one knows they are being advertised to. After all, since the "advertisment" is the absense of information, and a successful delievery is preventing a customer from being exposed to something that might negatively affect their impression, this form of marketing is extrodinarly effective if done right.
5. The marketers know DAMN well, that its more important for search engines to de-index content that attempts to trick their algorithims, than it is to prevent these marketers from being able to drop a couple posts that were critical of their products.
Either I'm completely crazy, or Time-Warner's marketing team has developed a rather extrodinary strategy to use the blogosphere to its competitive advantage
Update: 4/18 5:39PM: John Partilla: Guerrilla marketing extraordinaire and President of Time Warner Global Marketing
Meet our perfect suspect: John Partilla. He took over Time Warner's global marketing team in June 2004. Prior to that position, he was the founder and chief executive of Brand Buzz, a firm that specialized in guerrilla marketing and valued at $100 million dollars. Now, this is really interesting: The Time Warner website refers to his firm Brand Buzz as a "creative solutions agency". Everywhere else, people call them specialists in guerrilla and viral marketing.
So taking this back to our young upstart D'Arcy (discussed in the update below), perhaps this brings new meaning to his title "Chief Creative Officer." So, basically, we now have our perfect suspects. The question is: were they framed?
Update: 4/18 4:40PM: Chief Creative Officer? How Orwellian...
I've been doing some research into the background of AOL-Time-Warner's marketing team. Found out some interesting info. Late last summer Time Warner's Announced that their Global Marketing Group would be "entirely restructured" (read: everyone got fired). In particular, this quote caught my interest, "Mark D'Arcy has been named chief creative officer"(italics mine). What is a" Chief Creative Officer", you might be wondering? 33 year old D'Arcy describes his goal as being "to put together more robust ideas for our customers that take full advantage of the company's global assets in innovative ways." I think D'Arcy's title is a misnomer; it should be Chief Buzzword Officer. Chief Buzzword Officers are masters of creating robust and scalable solutions at the speed of internet-enabled business; and working with assets in innovative, client-centered ways...
Joking aside, it seems that if CNN is using spam, most likely it will be the work of their restructured Global Marketing Group. In addition, this is not a strategy I see coming from an old timer. D'Archy, at 33 and obviously sharp as they come, fits the bill of someone might be willing to experiment with the huge possibilites of marketing in our new media enviroment through the prevention of information, not in the distribution of it. Hell, that's the strategy the GOP's media machine has been using for over a decade. Of course, I might just be insane.
Update: 4/18 12:03AM
As it would turns out... a set of stuffed keywords are an extremely hard item to find using a search engine. I'm know I wasn't the only target... and there will probably be more targets. But, the moment google gets a chance to index an attacked site, we'll lose the page from the index -- and most likely, every other search engine will follow suit. I have a bad feeling that Stalin might be cackling down in hell, right now. And with that though, I'm calling it a day. BTW, if you've just arrived in the middle of this investigation, you'll proabably want to start at the bottom of this post.
Update: 4/17 11:29PM
Westfield, Massachusetts... its historical town; most jobs are either retail and manufacturing. There isn't a single listed provider of Internet services, no P.R. or marketing consultants or companies... and in short, it isalmost too perfect of a dead end...
Somewhere down there is a head that contains the answers that put this all together. It could have been some 14 year old kid who I suppose will take credit for inventing a censor-spam. Or, it could be a contractor who is quitely recieving a check from AOL-time-warner. Either way, it looks like I'll have to find another way to connect the dots. Not to mention, I doubt that bastard will be dropping me any more of these spams anytime soon.
Update: 4/17 9:03PM Central
Though I still can't jump to conclusions, further research has greatly increased my certainty that CNN used spam as a method of censorship.
Perhaps the most important development is that, I've discovered the repeated keywords to be far more poisonous than I had originally thought.
Normally, it seems a search engine will run across, say, a page title "how to plant a better garden", and then find 100 links to Texas Hodem... though I have not verified this, the search engines have probably found a way to identify comment spam as unintentional; in such cases,they probably don't punish the page quite as severely for attempting to trick the search engines.
However, in this case since the post is about CNN, and Blogs (both page titles, and headers contain those terms), finding the word "blog" and "CNN" repeated 8 times in the comment section is likely to be treated as intentional keyword stuffing. Most likely, this carries heavy penalties for whatever piece of content is 'censor-spammed'... (please tell me that we are not going to soon have a term for this...) which may be why i can't find any pages that have received a similar spam attacks on google.
In addition, the keywords that were most heavily stuffed into this piece of spam happen to be the strongest keywords for the page. In otherwords, these repeated keywords could not have been screaming "hey! Google! Please take this page out of your index!" louder.
Finally, my records show that it took 1 to 2 minutes for the content to be delivered. This is much slower than a spam bot. This suggest that a human being is actually selecting which content to attack.
The spammer is most likely using a popular SEO program from the 90's in addition to a simple keyword analyzer tool to produce the poisonous content; and indeed, it does infact appear to be the perfect brew if you want a blog post to just sort of "disappear". Spooky huh?
Original Post
Today, I recieved a bizarre comment on my blog regarding a (badly written) rant wrote about CNN. After some investigation, I am almost certain (I don't have absolute proof) that CNN is actively censoring blogs that have low opinions of their station; in addition, they seem to be also engaging in very clumsy attempt at gorrila marketing.
Now, at first, I thought I was being paranoid; after all, the search that appears to have led them to my blog was "CNN blogs", where I was ranked #131. However, upon scanning through all of the google's results, I realized that my post, at #131 was in fact the highest ranked blog post that expressed a negative opinion about CNN (this is key) abd allowed comments. That seems very fishy to me... are negative opinions about CNN THAT rare? Or, is CNN manipulating google, and assuming blogger's won't notice the comment that they leave in their archived content?
I know this seems far fetched... However, take a look at 1/10th of the string that I found at the end of the comment (google will punish repeated words, so I've inserted dashes to be safe:
n-e-ws ne-ws n-ews ne-w-s blo-g bl-og cn-n c-nn c-nn clo-g blo-g cn-n cn-n c-nn cn-n bl-og -blog blo-g blog- bl-og bl-og
I'm not an expert on google's search engine, however I do know that google punishes sites (sometimes severely) when they attempt to trick its algorithms. I don't think I've seen a site use this method of boosting google rankings since last decade!
Anyhow, like I said before, I'm not 100% sure of this. However, the notion of a major news network purposefully silencing opinions via by delivering spam that angers google does not sit well for me. If I am wrong about this, than thank god. Otherwise I consider this to be an extremely alarming taste of what could become part of a new generation of censorship methods.
Please leave a comment if you have any insight on this. I've left the text of the comment below, if anyone is interested (javascript and stuffed keywords removed). Its worth reading just for how bad of a gorrila marketing attempt it is. I'll update ya'll as soon as I know more.
Original Comment:
I used to be the biggest fan of CNN Headline News. It WAS great. I used to tune in a couple of times a day…at least before they butchered the show. Their new format is shameful. Have any of you seen Headline News Prime Time or Showbiz Tonight? No these are not new CNN channels, they have turned CNN Headline News into a gossip news station at night…it is just awful.
Basically, rather than having real news, during the nights and I think even sometimes during the day, they have this format that focuses on entertainment news and gossip. It is awful...worse than FoxNews...Actually it is more like The Enquirer meets Fox News
I refuse to watch this garbage. They even constantly have on NANCY GRACE (talk about trashy, she is the queen of trash) on to chit-chat about all of the Hollywood trials and everything else that you would read in a Hollywood Gossip column.
This is the opposite of real news. Remember the economy, politics, international affairs? Didn’t Headline News used to focus 95% on real news on only about 95% on fluff. How could they think that now people will tune in CNN to see only 5% real news and the rest gossip.
Please, if you have not yet seen prime time tonight...check it out tonight. It is usually on later in the evening. After you have seen this garbage, try telling me that I am wrong.
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Wednesday, February 23, 2005
Headline News gets a new look
By David Bauder / Associated Press
For a network that has built its reputation on predictability, CNN Headline News underwent some dramatic changes on Monday.
The network debuted a new prime-time lineup that dispenses with its usual continuous "wheel" of news. Like all-news radio stations, Headline News has run half-hour newscasts throughout the day and evening for its entire 23-year history.
The new lineup includes an hour-long entertainment program, a legal talk show with Nancy Grace as host and an hour-long newscast at 9 p.m.
Translation: Headline News' ratings sag during the evening. But the network is pleased with daytime ratings, and that format is remaining the same.
Grace's show, at 8 p.m., is the highest-profile launch. The former prosecutor is a frequent substitute for Larry King on CNN, and the new schedule allows her to continue this and not compete with King.
Karyn Bryant and A.J. Hammer are the hosts of "Showbiz Tonight" at 7 p.m., the hour many of the syndicated entertainment programs air. Following Grace is a traditional newscast, with Mike Galanos and Erica Hill. The timing is designed to not compete with newscasts on CNN.
CNN Headline News also revamped its onscreen look, making pictures the dominant element on the screen.
[this part of the comment omitted to avoid punishment by google]