Business Insider is reporting that Gawker’s ad sales unit believed it was negotiating ad placement with a man from the Starcom MediaVest Group — “one of the largest and most celebrated global brand communications and consumer contact organizations,” according to the shyster’s email  – but it was all an attempt to infiltrate reader computers. Gawker Media shared their entire email correspondence with Business Insider. Here is a portion of the fake query letter:

First and foremost, we want to run a performance campaign for Suzuki across your network. Our budget to start is $25k+. Campaign should be live by the end of the month. We can also run on moviefone and/or entertainment verticals.

Please let me know your rates, inventory and volume so we can include > you in our upcoming media plans.

Twenty-five thousand dollars by the end of the month sounds pretty good! And after numerous emails of insider shop talk, Gawker was fooled. Upon realizing the ads were not only fake, but dangerous, a Gawker sales employee was incredulous at how thorough the scam was: “Look at how together this guy was! Corporate politics, eCPM, premium branding, IAB sizes, re-evaluating rates! Outrageous.” Gawker then shared the following warning:

From: GAWKER SALES GUY

• Someone is approaching publishers as a representative of Spark-SMG on the Suzuki account, even though Suzuki very recently switched agencies.
• George Delarosa and his accomplice Douglas Velez claim that there’s a limited amount of money left in the Suzuki account for them to spend, and they need to spend it quickly.
• They have intimate knowledge of online ad sales, including terms like eCPM, roadblocking, RON, IAB sizes, lead generation, traffic coordinators, etc.
• Email comes from @spark-smg.com instead of @sparksmg.com, though the who-is for their spoof domain is very close to the actual domain (Erin has links in her original email)
• They maintain a Chicago area code (where Spark is based) but claim to be in London, even though they couldn’t give us the actual time in London when asked.
• Unlike most spammers, these guys were happy to jump on the phone to get ads back up and running.
• Clue that should have tipped us off was that we had to use our IO template…most major agencies like Spark have their own IO template.

But as far as malware distributors go, this guy is easily one of the most convincing I’ve ever seen. I doubt George is his real name, but whoever it is definitely worked in online ad sales at some point.

(pic via)

For all of the advertising woes that printed newspapers have encountered over the past few years, it’s an open question what will happen to them as they shift their focus online. The New York Times‘ Stephanie Clifford (who has been turning out really fascinating stuff week after week lately) warns that the Web may not be the Promised Land of newspaper ad sales, but there are a few hopeful indicators.

According to Clifford, advertisers tend to use newspaper sites to make a one-time splash, as when Mercedes rolled out its new line of E-Class cars on the NYT, WSJ, and Washington Post websites this past summer. But once the splash has been made, they shift their resources to other, cheaper networks:

One reason newspaper sites do not appear to be bouncing back as much as the overall Internet is price: after advertisers introduce their splashy campaigns on news sites, they can follow up with cheaper ads all over the Web.

“You get the big audience reach on your national brands, and you guarantee that by buying USA Today or The Times or other properties. And a secondary buy, you buy inexpensive, low-c.p.m. ad networks,” said Mr. Saridakis, using the industry shorthand for cost per thousand times an ad is shown. A display ad that might cost $10 to $20 per thousand at a site like USAToday.com could cost around half that amount when it is bought across an ad network of similar sites.

“They’re basically trying to buy the same audience at a third of the price,” he said.

If bloggers reading this think they have cause to gloat, they don’t. What’s at stake here isn’t fancypants newspaper articles upheld by bloated staffs, but smart, effortfully generated content, period. If eyeballs are eyeballs are eyeballs, regardless of quality of product, why bother building up a brand, personal or institutional? Why analyze when you can copypasta?  In short, what’s the point of trying if a pageview for a painstakingly written post has the same advertising value as an SEO-optimized 50 word rehash?

There’s a glimmer of hope in this Knight Digital Media Center writeup of a speech by Slate’s David Plotz:

More sophisticated ways of measuring usership and engagement will change focus from mass audience, Plotz believes, and that will make journalism better. Raw numbers create “pressure to produce one kind of story” that will draw hits. New metrics of engagement and behavior offer a “tremendous opportunity for Web journalism to escape the traffic” trap. He believes that will liberate Slate to “make a magazine that recognizes those dedicated readers.”

The fight at hand isn’t newspapers versus blogs versus splogs versus LOLcats, but between competing metrics. As long as CPM is the gold standard for online ads, advertisers will have a strong incentive to follow the eyeballs around, which they have the technology to do with a great degree of precision. Engagement-based metrics like Plotz advocates could free bloggers from the commoditization of their work, the lumping together of all types of content. But will they really be the metrics to win out in the end, or is that just a blogger’s pipe dream?

(image via artofthebiz)