As reported by Thom Weidlich on page 11, protesters tried to disrupt the DMA executive committee meeting in San Francisco last month. They dumped some “junk mail,” then were thrown out.
It was a nice stunt, although it failed to attract any media attention beyond that of the trade press. It would have been far more newsworthy if DMA goons had knocked the pair to the ground, then fed them a little shoe leather.
But it shows once again just what a dangerous situation direct mailers are in. They literally have nowhere to turn as they face the twin goblins of the environmental and privacy lobbies.
For their part, the environmentalists would have you stop sending tons of paper mail.
All well and good, although the advocates really ought to take on daily newspapers, which use up far more trees than DMers ever could.
But when mailers try to target their customers more precisely and thus save paper, they are denounced by the privacy lobby, which also opposes moving from traditional direct mail to e-mail.
Which lobby should we listen to? Both, for the two great movements are of one mind on a central point.
Essentially, they want direct marketing to disappear. That’s what we draw from the distinct anti-business messages put out by both groups.
Do DMers waste paper? Maybe, but they’re hardly the worst offenders. Do compilers sometimes step over the gray line? We all know of episodes.
Objective observers with no ax to grind are starting to take due note of the rhetorical overkill engaged in by the privacy lobby. For example, Jonathan Franzen wrote a piece in the Oct. 12 New Yorker, noting that Americans care about privacy mainly in the abstract.
“Just as most people are moderately afraid of germs but leave virology to the Centers for Disease Control, most Americans take a reasonable interest in privacy issues but leave the serious custodial work to experts,” Franzen wrote. “Our problem now is that the custodians have started speaking a language of panic and treating privacy not as one of many competing values but as the one value that trumps all others.”
Similarly, we’ve seen articles observing that European privacy laws are aimed at the wrong group. Though they grew out of the Nazi past and Cold War paranoia about intrusions by the state, they are applied against the private sector. Governments are still largely free to do what they please.
But back to the U.S.A. Direct marketing contributes $1.3 trillion to our economy, and it hurts no one. We can only hope it outlasts the fringe characters who sometimes have the ears of our legislators.
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