11/30/03
On November of 2003 I changed the name of my Mailing List Manager, then named, "Mojo Mail"* to Dada Mail to comply with the demands put forth in a letter from a lawyer of Mediaplex, Inc. Mediaplex owns the copyright of MOJO Mail and that's all well and good and I'll leave that as that in this short essay.
What is interesting is what Mediaplex is, or, what they say they are. According to their product page about MOJO Mail,
MOJO Mail provides efficient and comprehensive email campaign management and delivery. A web-based ASP product, MOJO Mail allows for powerful list management and secure and private list hosting to support diverse needs. MOJO Mail also offers exceptional tracking and reporting capabilities.
That's a huge mouthful, full of buzzwords, Acronyms and the like. It's very interesting that both Mediaplex's MOJO Mail and my once Mojo Mail* (Now Dada Mail) fill almost the same gap. In this essay I want to prove only one of my points , so I'm going to give the benefit of the doubt that both my program and their product came out at about the same time, with the same problem to solve, with the same name, without either of us knowing about the other - although with different ways to solve this problem.
If you fancy yourself on history, you'll find that some inventions, discoveries and whole Art movements happen in totally different places at almost the same time without any sort of explaination. It's weird.
For example, Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz both invented Calculus, Roger Penrose and Clark Richert both invented the Penrose- sorry, Richert-Penrose Tiles, Alexander Graham Bell and Johann Philipp Reis and perhaps two others invented the telephone and Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein started painting comic book characters really big and on canvas at the same time.
Those last two chaps, along with Jasper Johns, James Rosenquist, Wayne Thiebaud, Robert Rauschenberg and a boat load of others, made the spectical of "Pop Art", which was understood as a "Zeitgeist" or, "spirit of our times". So many similar things happened at the same time to be a phenomenom. I'm to think that zeitgeists are more common than not, due to a collective uncounscious or maybe we're all much more similar to each other than we thought, but I digress.
My solution to a mailing list manager was a small, simple, open source script that you can install yourself on a website account, theirs seems to be a large, complex, closed source application that is run as an "ASP" - meaning on their server, most likely for gobs and gobs of money.
That's all well and fine. The stark contrast to the way of solving a problem was probably an ingrediant on why I was never told about Mediaplex by Mediaplex, our "clientle" was different - but this is just a theory.
Back to, "What is Mediaplex's MOJO Mail". Their PDF brochure first statement is:
MOJO Mail provides opt-in email management and delivery for marketers.
For marketers.
Whatever that is. One of the main points of the letter I received from the lawyer of Mediaplex was my use of the word, "marketing", as in, "marketing tool". As in, my product could be used for "marketing". I took the liberty to search for the word snippet, "market" in (my) old support site. I only found one instance of the word, "market". It is as follows, taken from a page describing the administration features of the program:
Who knows what other mailing list managers have for a control panel (if any!) Are you willing to spend hundreds of dollars to find out that their 'simple interface' just meant a lack of features clouded by corporate marketing and a burnt hole in your pocket?
I will now restate what Mediaplex wrote on their page about MOJO Mail, under, "Overview"
MOJO Mail provides efficient and comprehensive email campaign management and delivery. A web-based ASP product, MOJO Mail allows for powerful list management and secure and private list hosting to support diverse needs. MOJO Mail also offers exceptional tracking and reporting capabilities.
Anyways, did the old support site mention that my program could be used for marketing: No!. Can my program be used for marketing: Yes! Can... a bullhorn be used for marketing: Yes! Can a snail be used for marketing: Why not?
It's entirely subjective to ask what can or cannot be used for a given task. Some things will be found to work better at certain tasks, but that doesn't stop anyone from using a banana as a love song or a nursery rhyme for a country's army. You can't say you can't.
Saying all this, it's very obvious that Mediaplex wants you to associate "marketing" with Mediaplex, and in this case, with their MOJO Mail. For instance, here are excerpts from their PDF brochure about MOJO Mail:
MOJO Mail provides opt-in email management and delivery for marketers
Sophisticated marketers leverage MOJO Mail to efficiently configure email campaigns Personalized Home page
Advanced marketing programs use the power of MOJO MailŐs opt-in list management functions
Email marketers rely on MOJO MailŐs delivery quality to ensure successful communications
Marketing communicators use the dynamic capabilities of MOJO Mail to deliver truly personalized messages
Smart marketers use the power of MOJO Reports to maximize results
ValueClick Media Ultraleads: Co-registration solution generates leads and follow-up emails for timely, targeted and cost-effective building of personalized interactive marketing relationships
Mediaplex, a ValueClick company, offers intelligent technology, customized solutions, and superior service to enable smart marketing.
Let's extrapolate that last idea of, "Smart Marketing" and then look at Mediaplex's own page about MOJO Mail in terms of Web Marketing.
One of the most important aspects of a webpage in a "web marketing" sense is the title. The title of the page is,
Mediaplex - Mail
It's interesting that the product's name isn't even in the title of the page that's soley there to pitch the program!
The page contains no meta keyword or description information. Meta keyword and description information help a search engine spider to index your site and find the relevance of the information provided within.
The page contains inline Javascript, which can get in the way of search engine spiders trying to actually index the site.
The page contains large gifs that are nothing but text! The text used is Arial, Verdana, Helvetica or a variant of a similar san serif face. By default, these fonts are available on most computers, so there's no reason to create images only of text. Search engines cannot read the text in an image.
The page code itself does not validate.
According to The W3C Markup Validation Service, the MOJO Mail page does not validate.
The page also seems to be written in HTML 4.01 Transitional, not XHTML 1.0, which in a marketing perspective, would be the way to go, since you can use the same content for viewing on a web browser or a cell phone, or a screen reader for the blind.
In summary, the page about MOJO Mail, written by self defined experts on marketing in a web marketers perspective is a nightmare. I can only imagine what the rest of their "smart marketing" is like. This is not something that want to be associated with, even by accident and I thank Mediaplex for contacting me on this matter.
I'm actually glad.
In closing, it's fairly amazing that I can write a page that works better as a marketing tool than an entire company of experts on marketing. For example, validate this page. My guess is that in a few weeks, a Google search for "Mojo Mail" will have this page ranked higher than Mediaplex's own page on MOJO Mail.
Update 5/29/04 - A search for Mojo Mail on Google gives the dadamail.org homepage first. Weird.
* Mediaplex and MOJO Mail are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Mediaplex Inc.