Myths of Direct Marketing Lobbyists

In their efforts to deny consumers the right to decide how their electronic mail boxes will be used, some disreputable direct marketing lobbyists are not above telling outright lies to argue their case. Here are a few of the most common.

Myth #1 - E-mail Marketing is Just Like Direct Mail

In fact the disreputable direct marketing lobbyists contradict themselves on this all the time. When presenting their case they will start off by claiming "Email marketing offers marketers a much cheaper way of direct marketing their products", and then continue to deny the very difference that they pointed out themselves by saying that "Email marketing is exactly the same as direct mail and should be treated the same". This key difference is critical to the problem, because the cost of other forms of direct marketing is what keeps those forms of direct marketing to be overused.

A small direct mail advertising run of 25,000 can cost over $10,000 once printing, packaging and distribution, and delivery fees are all taken into account. This means that the marketer needs to be confident of getting enough responses to cover those not insignificant costs.

A small spam run of 25,000 can be done at a cost of $25.48 - this includes the fee to open an account with a well known ISP, plus the cost of two telephone calls to that ISP. The $25.00 includes 5 hours of access, and this is more than enough time to scrape 25,000 email addresses from web pages or USENET news and transmit the spams. That's less than the cost of placing a classified advertisement in the Sydney Morning Herald or The Age. Imagine if every advertisement in those newspapers were to be sent as a spam. This is the situation that disreputable direct marketing lobbyists want consumers to accept.

Now imagine the number of advertisements placed in newspapers worldwide. Also consider this - every entry in the Yellow Pages represents somebody who might like to sell you something. The disreputable direct marketing lobbyists believe that every one of these businesses should be allowed to send you spam until you ask them, individually, to stop.

The costs of spamming are in fact so low that marketers don't even need to be confident of getting one response, because $25.48 is an insignificant amount of money for them to lose.

Myth #2 - Consumers are Happy With Opt-Out Email Marketing

In fact, there is no independent study into consumer attitudes to spam in Australia. The closest thing we have is Consumer Attitudes to Privacy, a 1995 survey by the Commonwealth Privacy Commissioner. Spam was in its early days then, and couldn't be included, but the study indicated that Australians consider direct marketing to be the worst kind of privacy violation that they deal with.

There have been independent studies in the United States. The 1st quarter 1999 edition of Pulse of the Customer, by Cognitiative, Inc, showed clearly the distaste consumers have for spamming, with responses by customers including actively avoiding the business that spams, and actually retaliating against the spamming business.

A second study by research firm GartnerGroup showed that many people actually close down their email accounts to avoid spam. This is not the behaviour of people who are happy with opt-out email marketing.

We would present independent surveys that showed that consumers love spam, but unfortunately we know of exactly zero of these.

Myth #3 - Filters Work Well for Those Who Want to Avoid Spam

Quite simply, there is no effective filtering technology that can get rid of all the spam without discarding legitimate messages. None, zero, zip. Even the best of human filters don't work very well. It is, in fact, not uncommon for users to delete legitimate messages thinking they are spam, and to open spam thinking they are legitimate messages. Despite what the disreputable direct marketing lobbyists would have people believe, there is simply no filter available that can effectively protect a mailbox against the unlimited potential sources of spam without losing legitimate messages.

What's more, even with their limited effectiveness, adding filtering software to filter mail from unlimited potential sources of spam means increasing the power of your mail processing system to cope, and increasing the size of your Internet connection to receive the spam your filter will hopefully be throwing away. And let's not forget that in Australia we pay for data we receive on the Internet - even if there is no item for per-megabyte charges on your ISP's price list, you can be sure these charges are factored in to your costs somehow, and the cost of receiving the spam is still there, even if it could be effectively filtered.

In reality, filters are now becoming a serious problem in themselves - aside from accidentally rejecting person to person messages, they often inadvertently reject legitimate opt-in email broadcasts. Even America Online has accidentally rejected opt-in newsletters because their filters mistook them for spam.

Myth #4 - Email Direct Marketers Will Sign on to a Code of Practice

Ignoring the fact that a Codes of Practice are frequently weak, essentially "recommendation" documents with no real enforcement capability attached, such codes are used by businesses with a significant investment to protect. Their limited effectiveness is completely destroyed when there is no barrier to entry. Quite literally, some spammers have turned out to be 15 year old children who financed the venture from their pocket money. It is ludicrous to suggest that all spammers will sign on to any code of practice.

Myth #5 - Direct Marketers Will Follow Codes of Practice They Have Signed

The Australian Direct Marketing Association recently recommended to their members that opt-out mailing (spamming) was an acceptable practice. This included recommendations that their members spam their customers. In fact, the ADMA Code of Practice, section E-9.3, requires that ADMA members request permission to send direct marketing materials to customers where it is practical to do so at the time of obtaining contact information. That is, the ADMA Code of Practice standard for spamming customers is opt-in where it is easy to obtain permission at the time of collection.

In fact, when collecting information on a web site, it is trivial to ask for permission, and so by their own code, information collected in that manner should only be used on an opt-in basis. Yet the ADMA recommended opt-out, effectively advising their own members to ignore the code. This clearly demonstrates that the ADMA and their code are worthless for the consumer protection purposes for which the code was said to be designed.

For more information, see our page on Opt Out - The Complete Non-Solution.