Red's McAfee team in San Francisco has won a coverted Sabre award winning the 'Best Use of Research For Publicity' category for McAfee's S.P.A.M Experiment project.

Red was tasked with the question; How do you make the tired topic of spam email newsworthy? The answer was recruit real people from around the world and ask them to do something McAfee has always advised against – “consume” spam email.

Inspired by Morgan Spurlock’s exposé documentary about fast food, “Super Size Me,” Red and McAfee gave 50 volunteers from 10 countries an unprotected laptop and a new e-mail address and told them to consume as much spam e-mail as they could for 30 days and blog about their experiences.

It wasn’t long before they were devouring the great news that they had won the lottery, were inheriting vast amounts of money from a long lost relative in Nigeria and were learning new ways to enhance their physical performance. The S.P.A.M. experiment made front page news headlines and the story ran across dozens of top media markets in the US.

McAfee’s S.P.A.M (Spammed Persistently All Month) experiment reached 95 million consumers in total and generated 60 pieces of media coverage in the US in April and June 2008, educating millions of consumers on the dangers of spam e-mail.