The Direct Marketing Association did not join an effort supporting a lawsuit against Utah’s child-protection no-e-mail registry because the DMA wanted to avoid the inevitable bad public relations, said the association’s president, John Greco, yesterday.
His comment marked the first time a DMA official has confirmed industry rumors that the organization is staying out of the Utah battle to avoid bad press.
“I’ve heard from a few people who were puzzled over why the DMA didn’t join the amicus brief filed a couple weeks ago by half a dozen advocacy organizations to raise concerns over Utah’s legislation,” said Greco in a Yale Club luncheon address to the Direct Marketing Club of New York.
“We knew if we did participate it would get spun as, quote, ‘DMA attacks efforts to protect children,’ unquote. You know that’s what the headline would have been. We believe such a perception would have been bad for our members,” Greco said.
Michigan and Utah passed laws over the summer that allow parents and guardians to register children’s e-mail addresses as off limits to e-mail containing anything or links to anything illegal for minors to view or buy. Marketers sending material inappropriate for minors are supposed to scrub their lists against these registries once per month. Iowa and Georgia are considering similar legislation.
Pornography trade group the Free Speech Coalition in November sued Utah to get the state’s registry declared an unconstitutional limit on interstate commerce and/or in violation of the federal Can-Spam Act.
Four national marketing and advertising organizations and two Internet civil liberties advocacy groups in January filed a so-called amicus brief, or court document, supporting the lawsuit because they believe, among other things, state registries place an unfair burden on law abiding companies.
Groups signed onto the effort were the E-mail Sender and Provider Coalition, the American Advertising Federation, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, the Association of National Advertisers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Center for Democracy and Technology.
Notably absent from the effort were the DMA and the Internet Advertising Bureau.
Greco said yesterday that the DMA is against do-not e-mail registries on the state level and on the federal level, but would back an appropriate national standard governing how to protect children from inappropriate e-mail.
Greco also reiterated the DMA’s position that another reason it has stayed out of the Utah fight is that it does not engage in court battles on the trial level, but does so on the appellate level when it believes it’s appropriate to do so.
At least one marketer who was considering a lawsuit against Utah was the focus of a harassment attempt. Beer Across America received an anonymous letter threatening a PR attack last year when it was learned that the beer-of-the-month club marketer was planning to lead a lawsuit against Utah.
Also, when the six organizations filed their amicus brief last month supporting the Free Speech Coalition, Matthew Prince, president of Unspam, the company that runs the registries in Utah and Michigan was quoted in a report saying, “I’m surprised that organizations like the Association of National Advertisers—whose boards are made up of companies like Wal-Mart and LeapFrog, and who have been at the forefront of protecting the rights of individuals and parents to choose what material comes into their homes—would support a lawsuit by the pornography industry, arguing that they have the right to send whatever and whenever they want, and to whomever they want.”
