Canadian e-mail software provider EliteEmail.com last week published a press release touting that it has signed up to use the offensively misnamed child-protection do-not-e-mail registries in Utah and Michigan—schemes the two states’ legislators crammed down marketers’ throats in 2005 at the urging of a company called Unspam.
“Our partnership with Registry Compliance [an Unspam-owned site] allows us to assure our clients they will never risk sending adult targeted emails to children in the states that have instituted this important registry,” said EliteEmail.com’s president, Robert Burko, in the release.
Partnership? Um, ok. Then all those telemarketing companies complying with the national do-not-call registry have “partnered” with the Federal Trade Commission.
Obviously, we’re going to have to buy EliteEmail.com’s executives each a cup of coffee or a beer and explain that Unspam is arguably the most hated company in the short history of permission-based e-mail marketing.
And then we should give them all swirlies.
What’s a swirly? It’s when you put someone’s head in a toilet and flush.
Maybe a little porcelain therapy would drive home to the folks at EliteEmail.com just how asinine everyone else in the industry thinks Michigan and Utah’s child no e-mail registries are.
For anyone who needs a refresher: At the urging, and with the help of Unspam’s president, Matthew Prince, Utah and Michigan passed laws in 2005 requiring marketers who want to include anything it is illegal for minors to view or buy in an e-mail to pay to screen their files against databases of minors’ addresses that parents have registered as off limits to such material.
Though the laws were dressed up as aiming to protect children from pornography, they were cynical attempts to drive easy state revenue.
They were also a thinly veiled effort at creating a business that could be rolled out to the 48 other states by Unspam, the company that maintains the two registries currently in existence.
However, Utah and Michigan’s registries have been financial wrecks. They have done nothing to protect kids from porn. Moreover, they increase the danger of kids’ e-mail addresses of falling into the hands of online predators.
At the same time, the child no-e-mail lists present needless financial burdens on law-abiding companies.
Michigan and Utah’s child no-e-mail registries truly do not have a single redeeming quality.
And now an e-mail software provider puts out a press release touting them?
Swirly! Swirly! Swirly!
Alright, so maybe a group swirly is a little much. After all, EliteEmail.com is ostensibly on our side, right?
How about hanging wedgies then? You know, where we lift them by their underwear and hook the waistbands to something taller than they are.
What? What’s that? Committing bullying, humiliating pranks is not how we do things in business? And this line of crude, juvenile thinking is an example of why I’ll never be anything more than a trade hack? What’s more, EliteEmail.com is simply trying to do what’s right for clients and has every right to tout that in a press release?
Oh. OK.
Just to make sure: Any idea involving duct tape, axle grease, chicken feathers, an engine hoist and a Taser is probably out, too, right?
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