One dreams of it reverting to its former name, for plagues have been unleashed upon the nation, plagues that have little to do with time-honored modes of direct mail.
The DMA, alas, has devolved from the protector of small enterprise to the mouthpiece of mega-corporations, as it has assumed the cudgel of arch plague apologist.
Until recently the DMA did a sensible and by no means socially irresponsible job of promoting alternative communications and distribution channels like direct mail, direct response space advertising and mail order. But now it worships different idols of the marketplace, and is in the business of promoting invasions into the private space of Americans via potentially toxic databases, spam and the most virulent, antisocial mode of marketing ever developed, telemarketing.
Folks enjoy catalogs, and you can even find pockets of affection for junk mail. But have you ever encountered anyone who has a good word to say about privacy invasions, spam and telemarketing?
"Telemarketing is one of the banes of modern life," wrote Walter Mossberg in the May 8 Wall Street Journal (hardly an anti-business publication). "The volume of unsolicited sales calls pouring into the average American home is so irritating that many folks would do just about anything to stop it."
In the May 18 New York Times, the National Review’s John J. Miller wrote that "…[A]t a weekly strategy meeting for conservatives…a representative from the telemarketing industry bad-mouthed a proposed Federal Trade Commission rule change that he said would expand government power and throttle small business—the sort of thing that normally reminds me of why I’m a right-winger.
"Only this time the government would muzzle unsolicited sales calls," Miller continued. "…The FTC merely proposes to set up a national ‘do not call’ list, banning telemarketers from phoning people who put their names on it. The telemarketers say millions of jobs are at stake, including jobs that ‘offer flexible hours, allowing parents to spend time with their families’—without noting that these jobs deprive other parents of spending time with their own.
"Libertarians like to say that my freedom ends where your nose begins," wrote Miller. "That classic aphorism needs a 21st century corollary: Your freedom ends where my phone line plugs in."
Most famously of all, future Supreme Court Justice Louis D. Brandeis and Samuel Warren wrote that privacy is "the right to be let alone," in "The Right to Privacy," 4 Harvard Law Review 193, 1890.
Contradicting all of the above—current, historical, conservative, liberal, right wing, libertarian, devil take the hindmost—is the CEO of the DMA, H. Robert Wientzen, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal on April 11 on the subject of telemarketing: "I don’t think government’s role is to prevent people from being bothered."
A privacy advocate friend sent me an e-mail saying "Wientzen is continuously shooting himself in the foot with his comments. I’m surprised he has any toes left."
She’s right. The DMA seems uniquely public relations challenged, but on the other hand, it would take the efforts of Edward L. Bernays, the father of public relations himself, to improve the image of outbound telemarketing. Here is a mode of marketing that people literally hate, but that continues to be used because predictive dialing technology is so good that it stays right ahead of the curve.
When the phone rings in the United States these days, your choices are:
* Ignore it, wondering if it’s something important.
* Interrupt whatever you’re doing to listen to the answering machine, which will probably register a hang-up.
* Answer the phone politely, for which you’ll be rewarded with an over-long, horribly scripted and badly delivered sales pitch.
* Answer the phone and be confrontational, which will make you feel bad.
* Answer the phone and be prankish, which will make you feel childish.
A nuisance, to say the least, but a terrible nuisance if you’re expecting an important call, particularly if it concerns a family health issue. The phone rings, the heart beats, and it turns out just to be another telemarketer.
Mass outbound predictive-dialed telemarketing is in the process of being legislated against, state by state. California, for example, wants dead calls (the creepy silence that scares lots of people) at no more than 1%, a figure that defeats the economies of predictive dialing. It’s shaping up as the statutory version of the death of a thousand cuts, a long agony for the telemarketing industry, the DMA and most of all, the poor consumer.
Does this mean that telemarketing will perish?
No, it means telemarketing in its current virulent state will be dead.
The biggest single flaw in telemarketing, as practiced in the United States in 2002, is that a classic direct marketing medium (targetable, trackable, adjustable) has been monstrously transformed into a mass marketing medium, through the sinister magic of predictive dialing.
It has all the horror of a small thing made huge, the creepiness of the giant insect in a horror film.
The solution is to restore telemarketing to its proper size and role.
Telemarketing’s virtues, as outlined decades ago by marketing guru Theodore Levitt, involve industrializing the person-to-person sales call. Predictive dialing has gotten out of control, and industrialization, rather than enabling the person-to-person element, has replaced it. It’s hard to put a human face behind the rote voice delivering its hundredth sales pitch of the evening, save for the occasional feeling of pity when you consider the constant rejection these poor telemarketers suffer. And of course the dreadful talking computer calls have no human face at all.
The DMA, direct marketing spokespeople and telemarketing apologists all recoil in horror at the idea of opt-in.
What are they saying? Well, they’re saying the stuff we sell is so bad, and the way we sell it is so obnoxious, that no one in their right mind would volunteer to be subjected to us. This is one of the most ultimately cynical and self-defeating postures in the history of business. If Coca-Cola can sell brown sugar water to happy throngs everywhere, shouldn’t any decent marketer be able to market themselves, above anything else? And that’s what opt-in is, marketing ourselves. Lack of ability to think this way is one of the great divides, I guess, between Madison Avenue and direct marketing.
Here are the two things that can save outbound consumer telemarketing.
Trained telemarketers should systematically make customer service calls shortly after a purchase (provided customers have divulged their phone numbers) to monitor customer satisfaction. These calls have to be legitimate, with action taken if customers have complaints. This is the one time telemarketing should be done without prior customer permission.
During this call, the trained telemarketer should educate the customer on the benefits of opt-in. The result? Maybe 100,000 names to call instead of a million, but a 10% response rate rather than 1%. If management requires that these customer service calls be cost-justified (a myopic perspective, to be sure), there’s nothing wrong with a little appropriate cross-selling in this benign environment. But remember: Never again, unless you get permission.
This process would result in smaller telemarketing factories, with fewer employees, but a better and more sustainable bottom line, particularly in comparison with predictive dialing’s Road Runner antics in trying to stay ahead of the Wile E. Coyote of consumer resentment.
This will assuredly not be business as usual, but telemarketing business as usual can’t—and—won’t continue much longer. Unfortunately, jobs will be lost, but we’re talking about the coal mines of the Information Age here, not long-term occupations, and the economy will come up with replacement opportunities soon enough. Certainly there will be a healthier, more humane, more productive climate, both for telemarketers and consumers.
Opt-in and permission marketing are the wave of the future for all addressable media, particularly media that have the kind of Sorcerer’s Apprentice, built-in obnoxiousness of spam and telemarketing.
The DMA needs to wake up to the realities of the 21st century, and stop mounting rear-guard offensives that are doomed to fail.
James R. Rosenfield is the principal of Rosenfield & Associates. He is the author of "Financial Services Direct Marketing" and "The Devil’s Dictionary of Marketing."
