Information for Direct Marketers

  A preview of Direct Marketing in the 21st Century

Click on any of the following areas to see some real Declarations published by consumers on their home pages: CA, CO, GA, GA, GA, IL, IL, MN, NY, NJ, OR, SD, TX, TX, VA, WI.

A common reaction is to point out that very few people currently have a home page. But then five years ago very few people had an email address. What seems unusual now may quickly become commonplace.

  The wide spectrum of reactions

This page is addressed to companies involved in direct marketing, but may also be of interest to consumers. It answers many of the kinds of questions we have had from direct marketers.

1. ``Free? Did you say we can get category-specific and company-specific data about consumers' interests straight from their home pages for free?'' How can we get it?
   You can get them through indexers such as Altavista, without any help from us. Eventually you'll also be able to get the URLs from our Web site.
2. ``This sounds fantastic. Consumers on the Web have a way to say they want us to send them stuff, and we can find out who they are without paying a penny? How can we get our company name added to the form?''
   You just ask us on your Web site.
3. ``Wait a minute. Did you say consumers on the Web also have a way to say they don't want to hear from us? We don't like that part so much. What can we do about it?
   We have a few suggestions. We think that smart, ethical companies will have opportunities both to benefit themselves and make their customers happier. Besides, wouldn't you rather save the paper and postage for someone who does want to hear from you?
4. ``This stuff about new opt-out technologies sounds like a sci-fi horror movie. What's going to happen to outbound telemarketing?''
   We don't really think your call centers are going to explode tomorrow, but we do believe that telemarketers will want to update their suppress files more frequently (which many are doing already).
5. ``What's all this about consumers licensing us to use information about them? And that they could enforce their permissions? This doesn't sound like such a good idea after all. We're calling our lawyers.''
   You might want to consider a few comments from us first. We don't think litigation is in anyone's best interests.
6. ``Actually, now that you mention it, those lawmakers are really getting worked up about consumer privacy. Are you sure your information has no privacy problems?''
   Absolutely. Every consumer explicitly told us that they want you to know it. Only the most insane legislation would prevent you from using it. This information is maintained by each consumer with the expectation and explicit request that it be used for direct marketing purposes. We think you might even like it better than what you're using now. It's fresh, originally researched, relevant, accurate, and just seconds away on the Internet. And remember the magic word: free.

  If you have it, get over it

If you already see us as an opportunity rather than a problem, skip ahead. If not, perhaps you're having an emotional reaction to the prospect of being told in public that a bunch of consumers don't want to hear from you. The sense of loss may follow the five stages of grief formulated by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her book On Death and Dying. If so, check the list below for the stage you may currently be experiencing, and our thoughts on how you can get over it.

1. Denial: ``Could you say that again?'' ``You can't do that.'' ``This can't be for real.'' ``It'll never work.'' ``Only lunatic geeks will use this.'' ``It'll all blow over in a week.'' You may be right. Check back later if you change your mind.
2. Anger: ``We'll sue your $@(&*@$# *!# off!'' We're sorry if you feel this way. You're welcome to express your anger by posting a diatribe to the Web and telling us where we can get it. But before calling your legal department, please consider our comments below.
3. Bargaining: ``Why are you spoiling the party for everyone? Can't we just sit down and work something out that's good for both of us?'' We're always open to new ideas, but we're not really interested in figuring out what's good for both of us; we're more interested in figuring out what's good for the consumer. We could easily have offered consumers something that would have been more profitable for us, but we have chosen instead to offer them what we think they'll like best in the long term. If you have a proposal that's good for you that you think they'll like better, by all means tell us, but tell them, too. We might use the idea if they tell us they like.
4. Depression: ``This is terrible. We'll never be able to market again.'' On the contrary, we believe that DECLARATIONs open up many new opportunities for the creative marketer, even in telemarketing.
5. Acceptance: ``OK, what can we do now to make the best of this opportunity?'' We're delighted to hear it. You probably want to read about how to prepare to get copies of consumers' DECLARATIONs. Also, we'd like to hear your thoughts on changes to the contents of the form used in the JUNKBUSTERS DECLARATION form, if you're prepared to work with other direct marketers and consumers to try to build some group recommendation based on public consensus. We expect it will need frequent updating in many ways: the wording, the hierarchical arrangement, and the individual companies mentioned in it. If you have some ideas, please start a dialog by publishing them.

  Why most companies will want to be named in Declarations

Being specifically mentioned in the form makes sense for a company that believes that its customers are more receptive to it than to its competitors. If such a company were not included in the form, it would be lumped together with its competitors, which market leaders may not want. Some consumers feel more comfortable allowing just one or two familiar brands in a category to mail them, rather than inviting all comers. (If the consumer indicates they don't want any solicitations in a category, we will not bother to name the specific companies under that category, so there's no negative association with your brand.)

Sure, a few of them might tell you that they'll listen to anyone except you, but wouldn't you rather save the paper on those people? You're unlikely to be able to convert them. And if you are well-regarded by consumers, you can expect many more home pages indicating encouragement for you and nobody else in your category. These unsolicited testimonials will be seen by those consumers' friends, and may get you new customers through this new ``word of mouse'' kind of referral.

We have only a limited amount of space, so we assess requests and negotiate fees on a case-by-case basis through each company's SPOC.

  How to publish a request on your Web site

To request inclusion, simply create a page on your Web site (preferably called junkreq.htm in your home directory) that contains the following text.

[Your full company name] requests Junkbusters to include our name [Your brand name as you wish it to appear in our form], with a link to this page, under the heading of [Your preferred heading as it appears in the existing version of the form] in programs relating to JUNKBUSTERS DECLARATIONs in [Your choice of country or countries]. We acknowledge and understand that the format and content of materials related to the programs may be changed without notice to or consent from us, and that inclusion will always be at Junkbusters' sole and absolute discretion.

The page should be left readable to the public indefinitely. We make no guarantee to grant your request within a specific time frame (or at all). If we do include it and you later decide it wasn't a good idea, you can subsequently request that your name be removed, but again we make no guarantees.

You will probably also want to include a link to your home page, because consumers who click on your name in our form may want to visit your web site. At your option, you can include in the page a statement concerning Junkbusters. This might consist of a policy statement indicating whether your organization intends to comply (immediately or in the future) with DECLARATIONs, and when consumers can expect to see the effect in their mailboxes, or it could express any view you may have on the subject. Or you can use the rest of the space for your usual content: you own it, after all.

  Registering your Single Point of Contact (SPOC)

Use our feedback form to tell us the URL where your request is published. In the ``Comment'' field you should specify the telephone and fax numbers and the mailing address of the person you nominate as your company's Single Point of Contact (SPOC) for this and all other matters. An email address must be supplied in the appropriate field. Keep a secure copy of the Comment ID Number that the form returns to you, and tell the SPOC to ask our account executive to quote it when first making contact, as an initial authentication check.

If your SPOC has not received an email acknowledgment by 1500 GMT Friday (afternoon in Europe, morning in America), an error has probably occurred, and the request should be resubmitted before the next deadline.

  How can direct marketers get copies of consumers' Declarations?

After the number of published Declarations reaches a viable size (say 10,000) we plan to publish lists of the URLs of DECLARATIONs that our clients indicated they are publishing on their own Web space. We do not plan to publish the DECLARATIONs themselves; you or someone you pay will have to go to the effort of running some simple software to get the DECLARATIONs from each consumer's Web pages. We plan to make the lists available on our Web site in a way that you should be able to copy them free of charge, without any specific prior arrangement by us. The copyright of the lists will be owned by us, with use by others governed by the GNU General Public License.

Note that while most plausible in-house uses of Declarations are permitted under the license offered by consumers, it doesn't allow you to impose a requirement on others not to redistribute it. Make your own enquiries if you wish to do this (but not to us). Note that in line with the GPL, we make no warranty about the lists; specifically we do not warrant that they are complete, accurate, or timely. No liability will be assumed for non-availability of the data or your use of it.

Check this paragraph or our What's news page for announcements of availability.

  Non-published Declarations will be available under license later

Our consumer clients have the option of telling us that they will not be publishing their DECLARATIONs themselves. After the free distribution of published DECLARATIONs is well established, we intend to offer non-published DECLARATIONs to appropriate companies for a fee and under a license that includes among other conditions the receiver's acknowledgment of the fact that these DECLARATIONs are unverified. Companies who may wish to receive non-published DECLARATIONs should register their SPOC with us. Please make your SPOC's identity known within your company (perhaps by announcing the name on your intranet) so that we do not have to deal with repeated requests from different parts of the same company.

  All Declarations are currently unverified

Please bear in mind that all DECLARATIONs are currently unverified: we do not guarantee that the person named in them was really the person who created the DECLARATION. Accordingly, you may want to take some appropriate action to verify the instructions.

  Try using Declaration permissions in your response models

After you get an adequately-sized batch of Declarations, may we suggest a simple investigation? Take the list from a recent mail drop and slice the response rates by whether the addressee issued a Declaration, and if so, by whether they denied, permitted or encouraged mail. We hope that the response rate will turn out to be proportional to the prospect's self-reported receptiveness. If you find that this is the case, you have a clear economic incentive to comply with consumers' expressed wishes.

You might find that this factor alone doesn't provide as much lift as other variables you currently have. But consider your situation if privacy legislation made those variables unobtainable and unusable, and prohibited you from renting lists without the consumer's explicit (positive option) consent. If you take the possibility of such legislation seriously, don't you think that a source of self-reported attitudes and permissions might be a good thing?

  What about the TSRs?

This paragraph is addressed to people who are employed as Telephone Sales Representatives who may be worried about losing their jobs. We are not smiling when we ask this question. Some of us have spent time cold calling: we were grateful to have had those jobs at that time, and wouldn't have wanted to lose them. We hope that this fear will turn out to be as unwarranted as the fear in the 1970's that word processing technology would cause widespread unemployment among office workers. It didn't, because the volume of work and the demand for new skills and higher quality increased. Read on to see why we don't think your boss will be worried either.

  What about the OTM vendors?

This paragraph is addressed to people who are running an outbound telemarketing business. You've probably already shrugged off any fears with the judgment that the kind of consumers who will use this service were the kind that you were never going to get past first base with anyway, but an insecure stakeholder might ask the question ``What if consumers opt out in such vast numbers that there won't be anyone left for me to call?'' This is sheer fantasy, but just suppose for a minute that an opt-out call were made on behalf of every consumer in the U.S. to every company in the U.S. that makes OTM calls to a consumers. A worst case scenario? Not if you ask the obvious question of who is going to answer all those calls. (There would be approximately 5,000,000,000,000 of them. At a dollar a call, the revenues would substantially affect the GNP of the United States.)

Few companies would want to have their own staff handling such calls; most would want to outsource such transactions. We don't think the market will be measured in the trillions, but if it turns out to be significant the obvious opportunity for OTM call centers is to convert any spare capacity from your outbound operations into a specialized inbound operation that uses Integrated Computer Telephony to process opt-out requests efficiently. Certain economies of scale can be obtained immediately. Your client might be able to determine from the calling party number (ANI) that the call is almost certainly an opt-out, and forward it to your center, where the likely script of the call can be retrieved before accepting the call. We're sure you would think of many ways to apply technology and management to process the calls accurately and efficiently.

But as we explained to consumers, we don't think this scenario will ever become a reality. We believe that it will all be completely unnecessary because of voluntary compliance. By simply getting phone numbers from the Web into your suppress files promptly, you can avoid annoying those people who have the means to annoy you back. You will probably want to aim for faster turnaround than in the past: once a consumer publishes a Declaration on the Web and submits it to Altavista to index, it becomes available to everyone in less than 24 hours. Ideally, we would like to see nightly updates taking effect on numbers stopped the next morning. This might seem ambitious, but we think it's what consumers should get, and it's within your ability to deliver.

We have been asked why, if we don't believe that the horror scenarios will happen, did we ever tell anyone about them. The reason is that the scenarios we describe are all fairly obvious once Declarations are published on the Web. If we didn't point it out, somebody else would, before very long. (The Internet has already been used by consumers to coordinate telephone bombardments on organizations. The most famous case was the defense of an elderly woman whose telephone number had been published as a misprint by an organization with a high volume of inbound calls.) If we did not bring the possibility to the attention of the telemarketing industry at the very beginning, and then two years later somebody used it to catch the industry by surprise, could we not be accused of failing to give fair warning? By alerting the industry of the future possibility before it can actually be put into full-scale operation, we are doing our best to help everyone to act in their best interests, and are actually reducing the ultimate impact.

  What about the list brokers and list managers?

You're probably already thought of some opportunities here; may we suggest one idea that might brighten the sometimes tarnished image of the list trade. Suppose you get an order from a children's clothing cataloger for a list of prospects in a particular geographical area, and when you pull the list you find that some of these households have issued Declarations that you got off the Web. You could decide to suppress those names, but if there are enough of them, our guess is that everyone would be happier if you returned them to your customer on a separate list containing a different set of variables. This would consist of only the information that the consumer volunteered. This may include highly relevant information such as whether they don't want, permit, or encourage clothing catalogs, and whether they specified that they encourage or discourage offers for infants and/or children. Your customer may actually be happier with that information than what is available on the other list (the responses will tell).

Under the GNU GPL, you are entitled to charge your customer for supplying this information, but you have to tell the customer that this list contains information freely licensed to you and everyone else by the consumers themselves. (You can still claim the other list as your property of course; the GPL allows you to aggregate licensed works with your property without forfeiting your rights.) Your customer will then know that they're paying you a nickel for a name that they could have got for nothing by themselves, but they'll probably be happy to pay that much for the convenience of having them sorted and separated from the rest of their prospects. They may also notice that they have the right to sell the list to anyone else, but we think they're unlikely to jump at the chance because they would have to tell everyone they try to sell it to that they can get it elsewhere for free.

This procedure would entail a little extra effort, but it gives you a clear conscience that you complied with the instructions of those consumers who went to the trouble and expense of saying how they want to be treated. In fact you may even be able to use this as a point of differentiation in the market, just as mutual funds offer ethical funds to attract a certain kind of investor. Catalogers might even start advertising to consumers that they use only ethical list companies, in the same way as tuna fish cans come labeled ``Dolphin Safe.'' We hope that you'll think of more ways to turn such opportunities into a win for both yourselves and consumers.

  It would probably make matters worse

We have considered the possibility that a belligerent direct marketing executive who didn't understand the opportunity here might try to stamp out an inconvenience by litigating against us. Here are some reasons why we think that the industry will resist such impulses.

  Consider what would happen if we disappeared

It might seem possible that a concerted effort by the DM industry could stop Junkbusters. Of course, widespread donations to our legal defense fund might make it an expensive, protracted, and widely publicized case (Junk Pushers v. Junkbusters, Consumers, Internet, Attorneys General, et al.), bringing our services to the attention of millions of people who might otherwise never have heard of us, but let's assume for a minute that it could be done, and ask: what would it achieve?

Anyone familiar with the culture of the Internet will tell you that it won't prevent consumers from creating and distributing their DECLARATIONs, nor from using DOOMCALL services. It is practically impossible to impede the flow of information on the Internet. Indeed, try to may have the opposite effect: Wired reported a sharp increase in indecent language on Usenet when the Communications Decency Act was passed. And consumers get to vote with their wallets every day.

Our operation is based on two key ideas that won't go away: that consumers can publish their own permissions on the Web in a consistent format, and that if these permissions are disregarded, a market for enforcement services might arise. We are simply the first offspring of these ideas. If we were thwarted by litigation, the activities necessary to complete our mission (and possibly some other much more inconvenient ones that we have no intention of conducting) would likely be picked up by other groups, some of which may regard the DM industry with malice and hostility (which we do not). Dealing with several guerilla-style organizations would certainly be less pleasant, more expensive, and less predictable than dealing with us.

The one certain consequence of litigation would be to establish the plaintiffs and the DM industry generally as villains in the public's mind, with the obvious repercussions. We have no desire to become martyrs, and it is certainly not in the DM industry's interests to create any. So we hope that the industry will respond in a civil and considered manner, and work constructively with us and consumers for everyone's benefit. You stand to save a stack of money on paper, improve your targeting, shave some of your list rental costs, and say goodbye to a lot of hassles about privacy. Does that sound so bad?

Copyright © 1996-2005 Guidescope Inc ®. Copying and distribution permitted under the GNU General Public License. 2005/01/15 http://www.junkbusters.com/info4dm.html