In 1986, on the then-popular Usenet computer network
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2025 3:37 am
The company, as with the launch of the new brand, launched an extremely aggressive advertising campaign, using all available means to promote Spam — as a result, the billionth can of "Spam" was sold in 1959, and 10 years later, canned food began to be associated with intrusive advertising.
In 1970, the British comedy group Monty Python released a sketch called Spam, in which they played on the situation with the ubiquitous advertising of canned food. In the clip, the characters find themselves in a cafe where every dish on the menu contains “Spam”, and all the visitors are deafeningly b2b email list singing the advertising song Spam. The humorous sketch, depicting the situation of that time, has not been forgotten a decade and a half after the release of the Monty Python sketch.
, a certain user named Dave Rhodes began to persistently advertise a pyramid scheme, posting the same text with instructions for getting rich in various forums, which quickly bored users. The audience quickly saw an analogy between these messages and the popular sketch (in the 3.5-minute Monty Python sketch, the word spam was mentioned 108 times), so the intrusive advertising was nicknamed after the canned food that was advertised in the same aggressive way.
Later, when spam (in this reading the word became common in a new meaning) had already turned into a way of earning money both honestly and openly fraudulently, Hormel Foods repeatedly tried to ban the use of its trademark in court, but could not do so. As a result, the word spam is nowadays associated with SPAM canned meat, which in many versions is still produced, in an absolute minority - for the majority of the audience it is "garbage" that comes to e-mail, on social networks and instant messengers or comes in the form of calls, but not a popular product in the middle of the last century.
In 1970, the British comedy group Monty Python released a sketch called Spam, in which they played on the situation with the ubiquitous advertising of canned food. In the clip, the characters find themselves in a cafe where every dish on the menu contains “Spam”, and all the visitors are deafeningly b2b email list singing the advertising song Spam. The humorous sketch, depicting the situation of that time, has not been forgotten a decade and a half after the release of the Monty Python sketch.
, a certain user named Dave Rhodes began to persistently advertise a pyramid scheme, posting the same text with instructions for getting rich in various forums, which quickly bored users. The audience quickly saw an analogy between these messages and the popular sketch (in the 3.5-minute Monty Python sketch, the word spam was mentioned 108 times), so the intrusive advertising was nicknamed after the canned food that was advertised in the same aggressive way.
Later, when spam (in this reading the word became common in a new meaning) had already turned into a way of earning money both honestly and openly fraudulently, Hormel Foods repeatedly tried to ban the use of its trademark in court, but could not do so. As a result, the word spam is nowadays associated with SPAM canned meat, which in many versions is still produced, in an absolute minority - for the majority of the audience it is "garbage" that comes to e-mail, on social networks and instant messengers or comes in the form of calls, but not a popular product in the middle of the last century.