Congratulations, telemarketers. You just got exactly what you asked for.
You have abused consumers for years, and now it’s time to pay.
Thanks to the FTC’s amended Telephone Sales Rule, you will no longer be able to deluge home phones with abandoned calls, debit credit cards without permission and simply ignore do-not-call requests. The TSR puts the consumer into the driver’s seat for the first time in the miserable history of outbound calling.
And stop whining about how this will hurt legitimate companies.
To reach the 1% who will respond to an offer, even the best firms think nothing of alienating the remaining 99% who receive the call.
Anyway, what’s legitimate about Triad Marketing and other exponents of advance consent marketing? To defend them is to defend the indefensible.
Maybe we would be less gleeful if the industry had stood up and taken on Triad and the other rip-off artists three years ago. But it ignored the issue, just as it ignored the escalating problem of hang-up calls.
But maybe we ought to slow down here and stop laying on the schadenfreude. We admit that the TSR is an imperfect document in many ways.
Take the provisions on advance consent marketing. Nobody can deny that this area is a cesspool in bad need of cleaning out. But the FTC should have stopped with the prohibition on billing a credit card without consent.
It’s overkill to force marketers to extract the last four digits of a credit card number from a consumer—again and again and again.
And why choose 18 months as the cutoff point for being allowed to call a past customer? As Elissa Matulis Myers, CEO of the Electronic Retailing Association, points out, that could hurt continuity marketers and anyone who would like to reactivate a customer.
Then there’s the do-not-call list, which even liberals can see has the potential for being a massive federal boondoggle. Isn’t it a little excessive for a company to have to run its file against a national do-not-call registry and 40 or 50 state lists (which is probably what we’ll have in only a few years)?
And what do we do when the FCC weighs in with its own idea on policing the phone? Have 40 state lists, one FTC list, a separate FCC file and the DMA’s TPS?
And don’t think the anti-telemarketing forces are pleased with the stew concocted by the FTC. Robert Bulmash, one of the most vehement critics of our beloved medium, says that "The telemarketing industry must love this because it will give them a list of people who don’t want to be solicited."
Do you people have any idea what you’re up against?
