• by Paul Gough , November 14, 2003

There's a lot of smart marketing going on in the efforts to can spam.

Yesterday, some of the nation's largest trade groups bought space in the Roll Call, a newspaper read by lawmakers, urging them to pass an anti-spam bill right away.

The Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the American Association of Advertising Agencies (AAAA) and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) have all gotten behind efforts to pass two bills, the CAN-SPAM Act in the Senate and the Reduction in Distribution of Spam Act in the House of Representatives.

"Immediate action is required to go after the bad guys on spam and avert a crisis that will bring legitimate electronic commerce to a screeching halt," the letter read.

More than a year ago, MediaPost Communications - publisher of Just an Online Minute, as well as MediaDailyNews and MEDIA Magazine - sponsored a session on email marketing at its annual Forecast conference. It asked, among things, whether excessive messaging would kill the golden goose that is email marketing. Or, with the benefit of 14 months of hindsight, the golden goose that could have been email marketing.

Yes, email marketing seems to work. Click-throughs and conversions make it profitable. It costs almost nothing to send, compared to printed direct mail and other forms of media. The letter said that about 12 percent of the $138 billion in business that's done online is email-related, meaning that email marketing drives $17 billion in sales annually.

But as H. Robert Wientzen, president and chief executive officer of the Direct Marketing Association, pointed out at a cross-media gathering last month in New York, some bad apples are spoiling the bunch. That's why he and other marketers, who don't want to see another marketing channel get plugged, are putting their weight behind efforts to pass a federal anti-spam bill. The alternatives are mind-boggling.

Think about it. If a federal bill isn't passed, marketers will be at the mercy of the states. The poster child for that scenario is California's infamous anti-spam law. They don't want that.

"Thirty-seven inconsistent state spam laws and proposals for a do-not-email list or labeling represent a knee-jerk reaction to the spam crisis. These approaches do nothing to reduce the intrusion of spam piling up in consumers' inboxes," the letter read. "What's worse, they mandate inconsistent standards that make compliance by honest businesses extraordinarily burdensome."

Some trade groups know what it's like to be on the other end of consumer sentiment and federal legislation. Just ask the DMA about the do-not-call registry. No one wants to be on the other side of an issue like that again.

-- Paul J. Gough