Businesses of all shapes and sizes spend a lot of time, money and effort building up a brand, a reputation and a view of how they want their customers and prospects to see them.

For ESP’s (email service providers) this will often involve building up a brand around their ability to target subscribers, send dynamic content, to deliver emails and that they have relationships with ISP’s who ultimately control what hits the inbox, what hits the spam folders and what doesn’t arrive at all.

Today then, when I was doing some googling for spam related key words whilst trying to get a view of what a lay-person perceives to be “spam” I found it very odd that one ESP actively does PPC (pay per click) advertising for the keyword “spam”.

PPC advertising, keyword "spam"

The ESP in question (shown above) tends to target the smaller businesses, perhaps the one-man-bands whose focus and expertise won’t be on the marketing but instead the operations side of the business being advertised. Therefore perhaps this advertising is well targeted to the potential customer e.g the lay-person of email.

That been said, I’m still not sure its a keyword I would choose to associate my business with if I were choosing the keywords for a PPC campaign.