Let’s pretend for a minute that nobody in the privacy lobby is going to read this and use it against direct marketers. But it’s time for a little straight talk about the spam issue.
Sure, the industry must pay lip service to the prevailing myths, but that’s no reason to hold back what some of us are really thinking.
Take the myth of the double opt-in, which many companies use because they’re terrified not to.
Call it what it is: feel-good rubbish. It may help you qualify prospects, but it won’t do a thing to protect anyone’s privacy.
No matter how many opt-ins you load on, the bad guys are still going to harvest names from chat rooms and trade sucker lists with each other. And your own customers are still going to accuse you of spamming them. A person who forgets that he opted in once is just as likely to forget that he opted in twice.
Granted, the double opt-in may help you with the ISPs when they try to shut you down. But this is hardly foolproof. Half the time, you will be judged by an illiterate techie who hates all advertising except for his Eddie Bauer catalog. To reason with him would be like trying to reason with the Taliban or the Khmer Rouge.
Then there’s the belief that the Direct Marketing Association is to blame for everything.
The DMA can perhaps be blamed for tactical errors and for serving bad food at its conferences. But when it comes to the spam issue, it’s doing what everyone else is doing
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