Shotgun Marketing. . . I've never liked or understood it and yet, it's amazingly common. The math tells you that tossing out a dozen or so ideas will give you a 5-15% hit ratio and that's where you take the lead and make your money. In this case the use of the technique differs slightly; it's just the number of people you reach; Ads in a printed magazine that has a 20,000 circulation rate monthly (very small) will give the advertisers a high gain of 1.2% with the low average being right at 3% of the distribution. These are the common stats on the average business, not established companies listed in nationally distributed sources.
When this is done via forums, I simply can't believe they get anything close to those ratios. More so, I would think they'd check the responses and make note of which forums or type of forum give them the better response ratio and as such, stop wasting time on the low/no-show producers. No, this is a bird I do not recognize, it seems a huge waste of resources to my mind.