The Direct Marketing Association has issued two new documents on complying with new California legislation and Federal Trade Commission (FTC) rules that take effect early this year.

Specifically, The DMA wants to alert members to new relating to California’s new privacy law, (S.B.27), as well as to the new FTC rule on how to determine the “primary purpose” of a commercial e-mail message pursuant to the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

SB 27, which went into effect on Jan. 1, applies only if personal information (of a California customer) is shared with third parties for direct marketing purposes but applies to online and offline activities for both for-profit and nonprofit entities.

In addition, the FTC issued its final rule on how to determine the “primary purpose” of a commercial e-mail message under the CAN-SPAM Act. This rule takes effect on Feb. 18.

The FTC added a fourth category of messages for purely transactional or relationship messages.

In this case, the FTC requires messages with both commercial and relationship or transactional content to have the relationship or transactional content appear at the beginning of the message. If they don’t, the primary purpose of the message will be deemed commercial.

The documents are available free to DMA members at www.the-dma.org/b2b/SB27_Compliance_Tool_Final.pdf and www.the-dma.org/press/PrimaryPurposeFactSheet.pdf