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)

Does advertising work? It’s an age-old question with an elusive answer. Today, TargetSpot, an internet radio advertising network, took a step toward proving its effectiveness by announcing a new system of analytics that will track the performance of audio ads online by monitoring the anticipated influx of website traffic after an internet radio spot airs. But is it accurate? And more importantly, what if the ads don’t do anything?

According to the company’s press release, TargetSpot analytics aim to enhance “accountability in advertising” by following the activity online at “advertiser-designated destination,” or company website, after airing an ad. This is all done through simple web coding:

An advertiser simply adds a small snippet of code to their destination website that corresponds to their TargetSpot ad campaign. TargetSpot Analytics can then provide information on each visit to the advertiser’s website, even if the consumer arrives there later through a search engine or by typing the website directly into the browser.

The ability to track the performance of ads that run online is “a key reason” for growth and in explaining why “other forms of advertising are in decline,” according to venture capitalist Fred Wilson, as he writes on his blog in a post about TargetSpot. The tallying of “clicks” on internet ads, thus far, has excluded audio and video though, because there is no actual clicking involved and this is the problem TargetSpot attempts to rectify.

At the end of Mad Men‘s second season, leading ad man Don Draper snaps, “I don’t sell advertising, I sell products,” at a coworker questioning his methods. Luckily for Don, he never worked with online advertising, because then his boastful claim could be quantified and possibly disproved. With print, and later television, ad men could contend that product sales depended on far more than just a successful campaign. But as the internet becomes the advertising destination du jour (and beyond?), we can track how potential customers respond to various appeals at their consumer psyches, and analytics like those of TargetSpot will be kingmakers — making and breaking advertising methods, as journalists and publishers observe from the edges of their seats.