As if small ad agencies weren’t challenged enough these days.

Twice in the past few days I’ve received genital spam, but I happened to notice this time that they purport to be from small ad agencies. One from a shop in Wichita, Kansas, and another from a shop in Florence, Alabama. The unblocked footers claimed the spam was copyrighted by those agencies. Right. IP checking showed they came from overseas, of course.

Now, I realize most people don’t read spam footers, but seriously. Suppose I hadn’t bothered to IP check? I’d probably think these agencies were in the genital spam business.

(UPDATE: I heard from one of the victimized agencies that their state attorney general advised reporting such spam to phishing-report@us-cert.gov.)

What’s interesting to me is why a spammer would do this. Apparently they believe that spam from an ad agency might seem more legitimate to the recipient. That led me to ponder the subconscious legitimacy we attach to advertising and marketing, depending on the execution and the media. I think a professionally executed message encourages an assumption of legitimacy on a brand; it means the enterprise is big enough and smart enough to do it right. (Unless it’s a consumer-generated campaign like the stuff we’ve seen lately for Taxslayer, which is an entirely different kind of appeal.)

The lowly and crafty spammers are just trying to tap into this predisposition to assign credibility to a message with the illusion that it came from professionals, to the detriment of the actual professionals, of course.