When Is Spam Not Spam?

So I recently [1] had an apologetic e-mail from someone I suspect may be a fellow marketer.

He was trying to promote a project, and hired an Internet marketing company to do that...and, only later, he learned that by "promote" they meant "spam on unrelated places in not-particularly-useful ways." And so he was running around, apologizing for those spammy bits of outreach and asking for them to be taken down. (I've just deleted the comment in question.)

That particularly mildly spammy comment had slipped by me, so I went to check it out, and found it was a link to an infographic on the History of Logistics and Supply Chain Management. Now, neither the original apologetic guy nor his too-slipshod Internet marketers apparently know this, but I, too, am a marketer, and one area I work in is supply chain management.

So, yes, I was spammed, since the link wasn't related to the topic of this blog. (Whatever that is on any given day.) But I was pointed at an well-crafted resource, in an area which is not uninteresting to me.

So then the question becomes: was that link actually spam, since I was interested in it once I noticed it? And is there a fuzzy border, where spammy content bumps up against content-y spam, and nothing is quite clearly one or the other?


[1] "Recently," in this context, means "about a month ago." E-mails often sit in my inbox to simmer in their own juices for far too long.