Most of you probably know the joke about old Mrs. Levey (no relation) and the butcher – the one where old Mrs. Levey asks the butcher for a fresh chicken.
She takes the first bird the butcher hands her, sniffs under its wings, and thrusts it back at him. "This chicken isn't fresh!" she says. The second chicken she sniffs smells okay under its wings, but when she sniffs its thighs, she renders the same verdict. "This chicken isn't fresh!"
Exasperated, the butcher looks at her. "Tell me," he asks. "Could you pass a test like that?"
I'm reminded of this by the hue and cry over the CIA, FBI and INS's combined failure to share information that might have prevented the tragedies of Sept. 11.
In a deliciously ironic note, it was Alabama Republican Sen. Richard Shelby who was condemning the breakdown in data transference. This is the same Richard Shelby who was behind the Drivers' Privacy Protection Act, which required any state wanting to share drivers license data to use an opt-in standard, a restriction that effectively cut off motor vehicle departments as a source of compiled data.
But there was Shelby last week, wringing his hands on Good Morning America and bemoaning the fact that these agencies hadn't shared their data that would have given them a complete, rounded picture of the terrorists.
What does any of this have to do with direct marketing? Well, marketers tend to have a lot of data on their customers stored in various unlinked locations. And despite all the noise in the industry about gaining a "360 degree view" of their customers, there's still a lot more smoke than substance.
So when a database administrator, or a marketing manager, or an information officer wrings his or her hands at the government's failure to link disparate data, let me ask:
Could you pass a test like that?
To respond to the opinions in this column, please contact rlevey@primediabusiness.com.
