Eighty percent of Americans find unsolicited e-mail very annoying, up from 49% roughly two years ago. Nearly 75% would make these messages illegal, according to a new survey by the Harris Poll.
Disdain for spam cut across gender, racial, income, political, and age lines, with 70% to 80% of all respondent categories indicating displeasure with it.
"It’s not surprising that consumers are concerned about spam," said Patricia Faley, vice president of ethics/consumer affairs for the Direct Marketing Association.
Faley continued, "Marketers are concerned about spam as well. But the way the Harris poll defined it they seem to think any mass e-mailing is spam, and that’s where we would disagree."
Faley feels the respondents are largely reacting to illegitimate marketers, whom she defines as the ones who don’t identify who they are. or who don’t allow consumers to opt out. They also include firms that who don’t identify where they are or the ones who send fraudulent content or unwanted pornographic content.
"In our experience people are not concerned about e-mail saying that Old Navy is having a sale, or Baby Gap is having a Christmas or holiday sale," Faley said.
Like the general public, the DMA does support certain types of legislation regarding electronic marketing. Specifically, the DMA feels that marketers should identify themselves, should offer a clear opt-out in each and every e-mail and should specify their geographic location.
Harris also found that consumers had the strongest negative reaction to pornography, with 91% saying it annoyed them a great deal. But financial services and investment solicitations also ranked high, with mortgages and loans, investments and real estate opportunities each earning more than a 60% disapproval rate.
"I was surprised that financial services companies and real estate companies were singled out as an area of concern," Faley said. "I am wondering if what consumers are reacting to are the ‘Nigerian’ scams."
Faley was referring to a get-rich-quick scheme that is now proliferating via e-mail.
But the survey found that other online issues have abated. For example, in a 2000 poll the number of respondents saying that they were very annoyed by the length of time it took for information to come up on their screen fell from 25% to 17%. And only 10% were put off by the amount of time it took for find Web sites they need, compared with 20% in the last survey.
Some things don’t change at all. Just under one third of all respondents were very annoyed with information from the Web being unreliable, only a slight dip from 35% in 2000. And 21% expressed annoyance at needing outsiders to make their systems run properly, compared with 18% in 2000.
Harris polled 2,221 adults in an online survey conducted between Nov. 22 and Dec. 2.
