H. Robert Wientzen, outgoing CEO of the Direct Marketing Association, pulled no punches with his audience in his keynote address at the Net.marketing conference on Wednesday.
“Do you follow ethical guidelines to the letter?” he asked. “Are you listening to consumers? Are you helping to eliminate industry-threatening practices by others?”
Learn from the past he warned, reminding his listeners about the experiences of sweepstakes marketers and outbound telemarketers. DMers failed themselves and their industry and now must carry the burden of regulation, he said, because they did not heed complaints.
“If you were sending a sweepstakes mailing that said, ‘You Are a Winner!,’ then the recipient should have been a winner,” Wientzen said. And, why didn’t telemarketers voluntarily make their practices more consumer-friendly?
For DMers marketing online, Wientzen said, now is the time to act. “Today’s consumer is—thanks largely to the Web—more informed and more in control,” he said. “And yet I don’t really think enough marketers act like that’s the case.”
Consumer protection policies should be ingrained in DMers corporate cultures, Wientzen said, not just posted in legalese somewhere on their site.
Can Spam was necessary and although it might not reduce spam, it does pre-empt the “hodgepodge” of 36 state laws, he said.
But, perhaps it’s time to move more aggressively on the self-regulation front, Wientzen said. One way to do that is to be “transparent” with information-usage practices and call for disclosure of information sharing by compilers.
Don’t forget, he said, “Policymakers seem more inclined to take action in the ‘privacy’ arena…[they] know that they’re on to something that the public and press are very receptive to.”
