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How the DMA's Mail Preference Service plays out...plus, some thoughts on South Africa, and the sorry state of business-to-business.
The Direct Marketing Association's Mail Preference Service (MPS) is a good public relations tool, and certainly well-intentioned. Through the years, though, I've had several concerns about it.
After looking carefully at the mail an enrollee friend receives, I'm happy to say that my anxieties have lessened.
First, my concerns. One of them is non-compliance, which can occur in two forms, technical glitches or ineptitude, and active malevolence.
Technological incompetency creates non-matches or mismatches allowing certain names and addresses to survive the suppression routines. There's nothing evil about this, but it's the kind of sloppy work that gets everyone in trouble.
And then there are the evil guys, DMA members who in the past have been non-compliant to the point of mailing on purpose to MPS names. We've all met these rascals, at least the ones who brag about it. I recall, to my horror, actually hearing a speaker at a DMA Conference a few years back comment that MPS is one of the most responsive lists in the world, since MPS people get less mail than other folks. (After all, just because consumers are on MPS doesn't mean they're non-mail responsive. It means they perceive they're getting too much junk mail, they're concerned about privacy, or they got exploited by a sleaze merchant.)
Chet Dalzell, the very helpful and well-informed DMA spokesperson, told me that mechanisms have been in place for about six or seven years for monitoring use of the MPS file, and in that period there's no evidence of a DMA member doing this. That, indeed, is a relief. Let's hope this kind of bad behavior is a permanent thing of the past.
There's another concern I have about the MPS. The majority of DMA members are legitimate businesspeople who do their best to comply. But DMA members are a small minority of the companies that use the mail channel for commercial purposes. Legitimate non-DMA mailers have access to the MPS, and presumably use it. But what about the sleazestakes operators, the predators who market real estate ripoff loans, or the porno pushers? Would the result be a mailbox filled with a...