Jackass of the Year: Cision Spam
Journalists and bloggers have no privacy rights? Spam pimps Anders Boös and Joe Bernardo think not as they sell your email address to blue chip spammers.
A surge of multinational corporate spam is gushing around the globe, enabled by a firm headquartered in Sweden that sells without permission the identities of 1.1 million journos, bloggers and editors — and there’s no easy exit from their spam lists.
If you blog, Cision may be selling your email address right now — like it or not. The firm conveniently keeps no records indicating how it acquires your identity and in my case, Cision simply lied.
A shameless self-promoter, Citibank California president Rebecca Macieira-Kaufmann breaks federal law with Cision spam that pitches her personal appearances in mass media. There, she hypes stuff like the “Citibank Promise,” a pledge to listen to customer feedback. She refuses to listen to feedback begging her to stop the spam sent with a bogus return address and no opt-out link. 100% illegal.
Thanks to bald Swedish brainiac Anders Boös and his Chicago-based U.S. henchman Joe Bernardo, corporate PR spam from Sony, 7-11, National Geographic, Cirque du Soleil and more lands in the in-boxes of journalists every hour of every day, slapping a happy face on stupid corporate tricks.
As Toyota tried to deny fatal flaws in its accelerators, the automaker’s Cision-powered spam gushed about flower beds the company planted along Los Angeles freeways.
Cision brags of owning the identities of “one million editors, analysts, freelancers, syndicated columnists, broadcast journalists and bloggers around the world.” You were never asked to be included? Cision shrugs it off. “We are not required to provide an opt-in option to list [sell] your email address,” writes Cision’s Heidi Sullivan.
Blogger Chris Kenton is among thousands who’ve discovered what happens once Cision sinks its fangs. Like Kenton, I was never asked to opt in, but I’ve tried since August to stop Cision from clogging an unpublished email address I use for uploading news reports. I’ve pleaded with Joe Bernardo but it’s easier to shake off the Nigerian bank account scam.
Cision admits that even if it stops selling your identity, its clients may continue to spam. “This is not a practice that we encourage,” Sullivan emails. But do they discourage or prohibit it? Sullivan refuses to provide a Cision spokesperson for a taped interview.
Cision doesn’t actually transmit corporate crapmail. It sells reporters’ identities in pricey products: a “Social Media Dashboard” or a “Premium Data Package.” Cision clients, perhaps unaware these contacts haven’t opted-in, don’t include unsubscribe mechanisms making their promo pitches illegal — each piece subject to fines of up to $16,000 under the Can Spam Act.
Cision calls the process “media intelligence.” We call it harassment. That forgotten newsroom fax machine, spewing reams of never-read media releases? It’s become your email box thanks to Cision.
Ironically, Cision’s Code of Conduct prohibits employees’ personal information and email addresses from being revealed but says nothing about protecting the privacy or identity rights of the journalists Cision targets.
What separates Cision from a Ukrainian porn huckster? Cision’s clients are classier. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation for instance. Does Bill — who despises spam — know about this? The Foundation won’t comment. Too embarrassing?
Rather than hijacking an unprotected server, Cision lets others spam with the dirty data it provides. The results are the same. Global corporations become unwitting spam bots. Stamp out one, ten more pop up in its place.
Next time a Cision spammer like Citibank offers its CEO for a radio interview, I’m going to take ‘em up on it, simply to ask why a seemingly respectable corporation relies on a spam enabler to enhance its image. Are you that desperate for good ink?
I’ll post the audio files here.
Meantime, you can help the Federal Trade Commission build a case against Cision and its clients by forwarding their spam to spam@uce.gov. You can also forward it to SpamCop which notifies the sender’s ISP and feeds various IP blacklists.
If any former Cision employees would like to share the firm’s spamming secrets, your anonymity is guaranteed.
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M O R E P O S T S
If Cision had been around in Shakespeare’s day, Henry VI might have read “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the spammers.”
I discovered last October that Cision was the source of the flood of PR spam in my inbox (one of their clients mentioned, as they all should, that this was where they got my contact details). I wrote to them as follows:
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I have been deluged recently with unwanted email from PR organizations promoting health-related products and services through press releases. I suspect that it may be because I am in your database of media contacts.
I am a health blogger, but as a deliberate policy I do not promote any kind of non-information products. I also specialize in a narrow area and the releases I am receiving are not relevant to me. Many of them are also US-specific, and I am not in the US. As a citizen and resident of New Zealand, I believe I am covered by NZ law regarding unsolicited email, which makes it illegal to send me these emails without a specific opt-in on my part.
If I am in your database, please remove me. I would also suggest that you revise your policies, since I did not ask to be included, did not want to be included, and in fact state clearly on my website that I do not want this kind of contact.
If I am not in your database, my apologies – but if you have any kind of “do not mail” list, I would like to be on it.
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I received this reply:
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I just wanted to personally let you know that I removed your name and contact information from our database. Clients are responsible for refreshing their own media lists, so sometimes it takes a few days for the email to completely stop, but as of today all information has been completely deleted. I sincerely apologize for any irrelevant press releases or PR materials you received as a result of your listing with us, and I thank you for drawing our attention to this issue.
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“A few days” for the email to stop? It’s still coming from at least three firms. Name and shame:
1. (Most frequent, and from multiple individuals): 5WPR, according to their website the 5th largest independent PR firm in New York. I have repeatedly asked to be removed from their database. The spam keeps coming.
2. Time. Yes, THAT Time. The one with all the magazines. The one I’ve asked twice to remove me from their list, but who are still spamming me.
3. Trent and Company. Again, multiple individuals have mailed me irrelevant “story ideas”, and I have asked three times to be unsubscribed, but they’re still spamming me.
(None of them supplied opt-out links, of course.)
I’m going to start reporting them for spam in the hope that these large companies, whose business depends on getting into people’s inboxes, get blacklisted by ISPs as the spammers they are.
Oh, and Rubenstein PR. On my seventh attempt today, I finally got a response from their main spammer, Adam Mazur (after I threatened to have his domain blacklisted). He asked what my speciality was so he could remove me from all their lists (to which I replied, in part, that none of the emails I had received had anything to do with what I blog about in the first place).
When I mentioned that I’d been added to a media contact directory without my knowledge or consent, he also said that I really should contact the company that included me, which of course I did months ago. I contacted HIM months ago, and have done so repeatedly, with no response until today.