1978 – It began with Spam
For a post-war child in England, there were various foods you wanted but couldn’t get, and others you didn’t want but were expected to eat instead. Chocolate was something parents spoke about lyrically, as was the case with many types of confectionery. On the other hand, at least in my experience, sago and rice pudding were two familiar and far from pleasant desserts that never seemed to disappear. However, these two paled into insignificance in the face of Spam. Spam came in a rectangular tin, and tasted awful. However, it was cheap, supposedly packed with protein, and so eat it we did. This tinned delight combined pork, salt, water, sugar, potato starch and sodium nitrite. The pork in Spam was pork shoulder, fatty and unappetising. This awful product, which I recollect as tasting as bad as it sounds, had been launched during the Great Depression, marketed as a cheap source of needed nutrients. It was invented by Jay Hormel, the son of George Hormel, founder of the Hormel Company. The name was an abbreviated combination of the words ‘spiced ham’, the result of a naming contest won by Ken Digneau, who received a $100 reward. Spam appeared on US shelves on July 5, 1937. Thanks Jay and Ken!
Apparently, it wasn’t an immediate success, with many shoppers suspicious of a meat product that didn’t need to be refrigerated. Maybe the taste put some people off, too? Anyway, as in so many developments in America, we can thank the military for its success. Wikipedia tells us “Spam went global during World War II, when America shipped out over 100 million cans to the Pacific, where it made an inexpensive yet filling meal for U.S. troops.” TIME was to add that “Among fed-up fighting men from Attu to Anzio, Spam became one of the most celebrated four-letter words in World War II, gave birth to a flavorsome [!!] literature of tales, odes, jokes, limericks.” Returning soldiers looked for their Spam, and by 1959 Hormel had sold a billion cans of the stuff. In the UK, its most important claim to fame came via Monty Python’s Flying Circus, with a 1970s segment in which a group of Vikings chant the words “Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam’ over the other characters’ attempts at speaking!
None of this seems to explain why a salty, greasy meat product gave the name to unwanted emails. That kind of spam first appeared in 1978 when DEC (the Digital Equipment Corporation) sent an advertisement for their DECSYSTEM-20 products to several hundred users on ARPANET – the forerunner to the World Wide Web. DEC marketer Gary Thuerk’s great idea was to prove a lemon, the reaction to this message was almost universally negative, and the idea was abandoned. However, you can’t keep a bad idea down. By the early 1990s, junk emails on the Internet were seen as a wonderful way to advertise. They quickly became known as spam, and sending out unsolicited emails was quickly recognised as an excellent advertising tool. At practically no cost, a person can use the internet to send a message to thousands of people.
You might think these unappetising junk electronic promotions eventually came to be called ‘Spam’ because they reminded recipients of those Monty Python Vikings singing their Spam ditty, the steadily increasing volume drowning out any other attempts at communication. However, it turns out the name “spam” was first applied, in April 1993, not to an email, but to unwanted postings to a computer user network, when one Richard Depew accidentally posted a message to 200 members. Recipients joked about his mishap, and one referred to the messages as “spam”. The word stuck, and it is now universally used for advertisements sent by email. A year later, in January 1994, the first large-scale deliberate spam email was sent out: a message with the subject “Global Alert for All: Jesus is Coming Soon” was cross-posted to every available user network group. Somehow the combination of Monty Python, tinned pork shoulder and Jesus came together, an appropriately bizarre combination to help ensure spam became a key term in everyday computer talk.
Ah, those golden days of spam. To begin with, it was annoying, but not much more than that. Then there were more and more spam messages, as ‘spammers’ found ways to get access to huge email lists. To retaliate, browsers added a spam folder, to remove many unwanted marketing messages from immediate view, together with spam blocking software (one suitably called Spam Assassin). Marketers never give up, and by the 21st Century, the spam situation was getting getting out of hand. By June 2000 simple email-validation systems were being released to detect email spoofing as a way to stop spam getting through. However, once the government got in on the act, most computer users knew we knew we were doomed. President George W Bush signed a new law, CAN SPAM (!!), setting national standards for commercial emails.. That name? If comes from the bill’s title: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003, relying on a word play on ‘canning’ (putting an end to) spam, and maybe a pun on canned Spam? Hey, all was good: in early 2004 Bill Gate announced that “spam will soon be a thing of the past.”
There must be some kind of food obsession gong on here, because the next step in the steady advance of the marketers began with the introduction of cookies, a software routine added to computer browsers by search engines. These emerged in 1994, just a few months after network spamming was starting to become an increasingly annoying issue. For this innovation we can thank Netscape. In the early days of web browsers, the recipient of a browser enquiry, a gardening goods store, say, had to store all the information from the enquirer as a request was being processed, and, even worse, made it virtually impossible to use a shopping cart (the virtual kind you see when shopping online), which could only work if the online company had a way to store and manage information throughout an online enquiry. The solution was simple. Place some appropriate software on the user’s computer to allow a transaction in progress to be stored there.
To begin with, the use of cookies helped with authentication – has this user been here before, or is a request still in process? Cookies are really better described as HTTP cookies or browser cookies and they are useful, even essential. They are the means by which past information, even past links, can be retained, and more recently previous information you’ve added to a website can be stored (name, address, etc). There is not doubt that these authentication cookies are helpful, and without them we would have to constantly provide data to new web pages or websites to continue access. However, the information being stored is potentially useful to others, and with the development of cookies security has been a continuing issue. Hackers can use cookie data to gain access to websites and interact with them, using your database as a proxy – even using credit card information, for example, to order goods or services. Why are cookies a source of ongoing security concerns. You, as the user of a website, are dependent on that website’s management of the data they collect through their cookies, and many do not encrypt the data they hold.
All this is enough of a potential hazard, but technology moved on and now there are other cookies to consider. A cookie from a website, like that of the gardening store I mentioned earlier, is linked to that website’s domain (its place on the web), and if it is restricted to helping you complete a transaction, it is called a ‘first party cookie’. However, now many websites also have ‘third party cookies’! How does this work? Suppose you go to the website of your local newspaper. The first time you visit, you will almost always see a notice at the bottom of the screen saying the website uses cookies, and seeking your permission to have them placed on your device. Some will be for the newspaper you are reading, but others will be for the advertisements in the paper, and so the advertiser receives information about you as well as the newspaper. These allow the advertiser to track your preferences (through the searches you have been making), and even more so if you have allowed third-party cookies from several websites. The technology is complicated, and not very relevant (and my explanation is rather poor), but the outcome is simple: third-party cookies are often used by advertisers to develop targeted advertising – aimed at you.
In the past, I found this to be a really disconcerting problem when I was using Google. Suppose I was thinking about going on holiday in Germany (as I did, and this example comes from that series of web enquires a few years ago). In my searches, I had identified a number of hotels in cities where I was considering staying for a couple of nights – in Frankfurt, Bonn, etc. Various helpful booking sites like hotels.com, Expedia, and others discovered my interest through third-party cookies, and quickly started pushing out advertisements for places to stay, even though my plans changed. Not only did this happen at the time I was searching, but, to my considerable annoyance I was still getting advertisements from hotels in these cities four years later!
With each step down this slippery slope of intrusive online marketing, there are attempts to put controls in place. Most web browsers, like Safari and Firefox, have settings that allow you to block third-party cookies. Marketers have attempted to get around these by that notice at the bottom of the page when you visit a web page: you’re told the website uses cookies to enhance the experience, and asks if you to confirm you’ll accept them. Even if you can remember the consequences, when time is pressing it is easy to forget your concerns, and agree! Now there are a new variety of cookies appearing – supercookies – even more sneaky than the third-party kind. As usual, the browsers are working hard to deal with each new form of spying.
Sadly, there is more. As the battle against unwanted cookies – and unwanted advertising – continues, now we are facing another challenge. Cookies only help marketers so far. They give a company information about your interests, and where you’ve been searching. However, that’s all about history. What about marketing to you before you ‘knew’ you needed something? The ultimate marketing goal is to know what you want before you know you want it, and have plans in place to help you discover your future need!
In the current environment, the issue revolves around ‘big data, analytics, and comparisons’. The underlying logic of this approach is to check what is known about you against thousands, even millions of similar people. I have described how this impacted on the book selling world in an earlier blog: thank you Jeff Bezos! As the process has been refined, marketers discovered that encouraging you to buy something a friend had acquired was especially ingenious: after all, if a friend bought it, it must be good, or, alternatively it is a way to keep up with the trends that matter. Analytics to ‘keep us up with the Joneses’!
How disconcerting might it be one morning to receive a marketing flier, an email, or a pop up about a trip to Jabiru, as an example. Just the other day you had been considering a holiday, and the idea of going to Kakadu had been on your mind. Then you saw a television program about the handover from Rio Tinto to the traditional land owners of the region, and how the town of Jabiru was saved, not obliterated as had originally been proposed as a task for the beginning of this year. Next, a friend gets in touch, and says that with the coronavirus limitations reducing, this is the first opportunity to travel, but it has to be within Australia. Where to go? Well, that hotel in Jabiru looked great, and it’s right in the centre of the national park. How did they know this would appeal to you? Are you that predictable – or are you merely suggestible? Whatever the basis for the approach, now marketers want to anticipate our needs and wants, and shape our expectations.
There is one big difference between this new round of marketing and previous methods. The information being used is by comparing each one of us with a vast number of other people, rather than relying on what has been found from our own data. Isn’t that better? No, sadly, it is worse. It is not just that we find the selling lines persuasive, given they draw on such a vast body of data. Rather it is because we are being subtly (almost invisibly) being managed: each person sees the marketing tailored for them, without realising it is part of a more general process of putting us together with others ‘just like us’. Why stop with holidays or clothes? This would be good for news, current affairs, political insights and economic information. The better the big data system becomes, the more we lose touch with alternatives, as we are carefully – and happily – shepherded along a path.
What was that great oratorio? ‘For we like sheep have gone astray.’ Now it is ‘For we like sheep are going the right way’, while losing touch with the other flocks around us. If you go back to big brother and 1984, the battle was against one controlling voice. Today it is far more worrying, not one Big Brother to see and fear, one controlling force to resist, but hundreds of commercial entities nudging and pushing each one of us into a thousand little groups, the members of which share many attributes but hardly know each other. Pork shoulder in a can was for everyone: Spam, Spam, Spam. Online advertising was hit and miss, and even television marketing was clumsy and relied on a low percentage of sales. But today’s innovations have no name like Spam – you can scarcely wander the streets shouting Big Data, Big Data, Big Data. You would almost certainly end up in counselling, or even incarceration. No visible Big Brother. Just a very clever system to give you what hadn’t quite realised you wanted … until it was there.
In 1949, long before the first spam emails, in Aldous Huxley wrote to George Orwell to congratulate him on the publication of 1984, observing, “how fine and how profoundly important the book is.” However, he could see it was aimed at a stepping stone, not the eventual system: “within the next generation I believe that the world’s leaders will discover that infant conditioning and narcohypnosis are more efficient, as instruments of government, than clubs and prisons, and that the lust for power can be just as completely satisfied by suggesting people into loving their servitude as by flogging them and kicking them into obedience”. Huxley had already written about such a future in Brave New World, published in 1932. Narcohypnosis? A hypnotic state induced by narcotics, and, after the Second World War, a briefly popular approach to psychiatric treatment.
I can’t help feeling that Spam and big data are connected. Both are treatments, disguising their true content, and both intended to lull you into a sense of satisfaction. In Handel’s Messiah, the chorus enthusiastically sings, “All we like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned to our own way”, the words coming from Isiah (although in some translations it begins “We all, like sheep, have gone astray”). They seem to be enjoying the vision. Today, it seems we are like sheep, each of us deluded into thinking we are going off on our own way, while we are carefully taken in the right direction, along one of a thousand carefully curated but different paths. We didn’t need infant conditioning, nor drugs, just the steady drone of advertising, the true opiate of the masses.
Are we so totally encapsulated in our ‘brave new world’ that we are unable to see what is happening to us? Homes, products, adventures, all part of a soothing, soporific existence. ‘No worries’ as an Australian would tell you. Like those overweight people in Wall-E, we listlessly find ourselves going where we are supposed to go. Please, as you are on the edge of slumber in the the cathedral of commerce, try to stay awake long enough to remember to offer a prayer to DEC’s spammer Gary Thuerk and Netscape’s ‘cookie monster’, a programmer named Lou Montulli, who came up with the first browser cookies. Have I missed a third innovator in this collection, the person who came up with the use of big data to influence our choices? No matter. In this religion, names are less important than inventions. Please pray to big data, too.
