Since the September passage of California's anti-spam law, most of the bleating about it has come from marketers and their reps - no surprise there, given that their email marketing efforts might have to be overhauled in order to comply with its rigid provisions. For the most part, California officials haven't had much to say about the uproar, noting simply that they did what their constituents demanded. But when a joint letter from the Direct Marketing Association, the Association of National Advertisers, and the American Association of Advertising Agencies to the members of Congress was published last Thursday in Roll Call, California legislators quickly took to the media to address the situation. Not surprisingly, the legislators argued that the letter misrepresented the spirit of the California law as well as other state statutes enacted to combat spam. Less expected, however, was the vehement tone of some of the responses. In response to questions posed by MediaDailyNews, California state Senator Debra Bowen (D-Redondo Beach) said via email that characterizations of the new law have been at best inaccurate and at worst deliberately misleading. Bowen has been at the forefront of the spam debate in California for several years. She authored the state's 1998 anti-spam law and introduced a bill earlier this year to toughen it up, although it was defeated in the state Assembly. Many of its provisions found their way into the law that was passed (S.B. 186, authored by Senator Kevin Murray, D-Los Angeles). Bowen reserved much of her scorn for the DMA and what she views as its self-serving agenda. Asked about a comment made by DMA senior vice president, government affairs Jerry Cerasale at Bigfoot Interactive's PROfile Email Summit last week - he suggested that sending résumés to California-based companies would be illegal under the new law, as individuals would technically be advertising themselves - Bowen said that the DMA needed to read the law. "This notion that someone is going to get sued for sending out a job offer or emailing a résumé is ridiculous," she said. "You know, we aren't exactly charting new ground here. The 'opt-in' spam law is based on the federal law and regulations that ban junk faxes and prevent companies from faxing unsolicited ads to people who haven't 'opted-in' to get them. Those regulations have been around for more than a decade, and no one who faxes a résumé to apply for a job is being prosecuted as a junk faxer. "Besides, do you really think the Direct Marketing Association cares about whether someone can email a resume to apply for a job? Of course not," she continued. "They care about whether they can email unsolicited ads to people without their permission. That's the DMA's mission in life. It's why DMA opposed the junk-fax ban, why it opposed the do-not-call list and why it opposed California's 'opt-in' spam law. To say DMA's credibility on the issue is low and still dropping would be an understatement." Bowen also scoffed at comments made at the Bigfoot conference by Internet Alliance state policy director Emily Hackett, who said that consented-to email newsletters that contain some ad content would violate the California law. "That's a bit of a red herring and it's pretty disingenuous of DMA and others to hold that out as the linchpin of their opposition," she said. "These marketers don't want to put an ad into a real newsletter, they want to send you an unsolicited ad and call it a newsletter. Should a car dealer who takes out an ad in a community newsletter that someone opts-in to get via email be sued for spamming? Of course not. Are marketers who decorate their unsolicited ads with a few lines of text and call it a 'newsletter' really just a spammer in disguise? Absolutely. The trick is to figure out a way to go after the latter, not the former." She conceded that California's law "may be a little too tight" in this regard, but added, "I certainly prefer that to the gaping loopholes in the federal bills that give both newsletters with corporate logos and good old-fashioned spam a shining seal of approval." As for the expectations of California consumers regarding the new law, Bowen doesn't think they consider it a "silver bullet" that will prevent every unsolicited commercial email from reaching their inboxes. "Most people can deal with a rain shower from time to time, but they're sick to death of the daily spam monsoons they have to weather," she said. "If the law helps turn the monsoons into an April shower or two, I think most computer users will probably be pretty happy." Regarding Hackett's crack that the best way for marketers to ensure they don't violate any of the law's provisions would be "don't send anything to California and see how they like it," Bowen responded, "I'll bet 99 percent of California's computer users and businesses... would stand up and applaud if marketers would follow that advice." Bowen does agree with the DMA and other marketing groups on one pivotal issue: that a nationwide do-not-spam registry is a very, very bad idea. "Creating a national do-not-spam list is akin to creating an engraved invitation to hackers, because it would be the single best email marketing list in the country," she explained. "I can't imagine people feeling comfortable handing over the email address they really care about and saying, 'OK, here's my valid email address. Don't spam me!'" Bowen also agrees that the eventual solution to the spam epidemic will involve some combination of legislation, technology and consumer action. "That's something I've emphasized through the whole legislative process here in California," she noted. "You need both technology and legal solutions to really make a dent in the volume of spam. One of my problems with filters, though, is philosophical. Why should I have to go buy a software filter to prevent someone from sending me unsolicited ads that I don't want to get?" Bowen likened spam to junk faxing rather than telemarketing in that recipients pay to receive the ads. "With junk faxes, it's paper and toner. With spam, it's higher Internet access fees, slower service and email inbox capacity," she said. "You can't read or send email if your PC is tied up for 20 minutes receiving a load of spam, so your time and the money you've spent for Internet access is wasted. "It's against the law for marketers to go around filling up people's voice mail boxes with sales pitches. The same ought to be true for email boxes."
Online radio has been around for several years, boasts millions of listeners and has everything most marketers want in terms of demographics. But as far as many buyers and planners are concerned, the medium is still evolving and thus not yet deserving of their clients' dollars. This is no small source of frustration to media veteran Ken Dardis, president of television and radio production firm Audio Graphics. "That's pretty much what we're facing," he shrugs. "The big problem is retraining the whole system to accept what online radio offers." Dardis, however, believes that most Internet radio broadcasters are relying way too heavily on impressions during the sales process. To this end, he is attempting to create an alternate model for online radio sales via his RRadio Network. RRadio, a community of more than 40 online radio stations that have aggregated their audience for sale to advertisers, is hoping to lure marketers to the Internet via data collected through station-branded surveys. The concept is pretty simple: visitors to any of the network's sites (which include www.boomerradio.com and www.beethoven.com) are given the chance to fill out a survey, which asks two or three questions about a specific product category or service. For example, the survey currently running across the RRadio network asks listeners if they plan to buy a car, truck or SUV during the next year, which ad medium they believe is most effective, and how old they are. Over the last 20 months, Dardis has conducted 19 of these surveys, collecting a veritable mountain of data in the process. What he plans to do is take this information to advertisers and, ideally, use it to crack their skepticism about the viability of advertising on Internet radio. "By showing them the data, what we're doing is strengthening the argument that the online radio audience will tell us specific things about themselves and about what they want," Dardis explains. "In no other media do we have that happening. For us to sit back and wait for Arbitron to tell us who's listening based on 1,200 phone calls is ridiculous." His sales pitch is similarly unique. "Rather than going to a client and saying 'I want to sell you one million impressions,' we're saying 'I'm going to deliver you 12,000 completed surveys with an email address attached to them," Dardis explains. Of course, in the process of compiling 12,000 surveys, Dardis estimates that roughly 110,000 people will have opened the survey and more than 1.2 million will have viewed the ad leading to the survey. "All of those impressions are free," he says. "All that clients are buying is the data. We're here to deliver information, and advertising is a by-product of that information." Of course, he will also have demographic data about online listeners in hand during these conversations. "Online radio delivers a more affluent and educated audience that you can purchase in any other media - it's not even that close," he says fervently. "A classical music station doesn't sell by Arbitron. They sell the quality of what they deliver, and that's what online radio is bringing to the table." When asked about his list of clients, Dardis quickly retorts "none, zero, but we're only now starting to push this forward." He believes that similar patience will be necessary if online radio is to take off as a medium. "I used to go around to radio stations with [Metro Networks founder] David Saperstein, and we'd get thrown out for saying that they should put traffic reports on the air," he recalls. "I think that's the same resistance we're seeing now with online radio. It took six years to get those traffic reports accepted, and that's where we are on the timeline with online radio." Other companies under the Audio Graphics banner include www.RadioRow.com (a portal for radio stations that stream) and www.RRadioMusic.com (a site designed to expose unsigned artists to radio programmers). The company also produces a handful of software products.
comScore Tuesday released its monthly top 50 U.S. Internet properties for the month of October, which included the top gaining properties and categories for the month along with a new reporting service called Ad Focus Reporting. Among the key findings in the report were big increases in consumer confidence in online spending-particularly retail. In October, retail accounted for nine of the Top Ten Gaining Properties. comScore says that a similar increase has occurred in preceding years around this time and likely reflects the first signs of the holiday shopping season, but it also mirrors an increase in the Consumer Confidence Index from September to October. The Retail-Department Stores category showed the largest gain in October, with a 25 percent jump in unique visitors. The Home Furnishing category is up 36 percent from a year ago, and 9 percent from September. ComScore reveals that research has shown Home Furnishings to be one of this year's fastest growing product categories. Fragrances/Cosmetics and Comparison Shopping have all reported impressive growth at 11 percent and 9 percent, respectively. E-Cards was the lone category not from the retail sector. While comScore concedes that the egreetings boost is also most likely related to the holiday season, Halloween-related cards accounting for much of the 10 percent increase in visitors to this category. Incidentally, the search for the right Halloween costume led to BuyCostumes.com's 167 percent increase in sales from September to October, which made it the top gaining site among the top 250 properties for the month. E-invitations distributor Evite, among the top 250 properties, experienced a 26 percent Halloween increase in sales. Peter Daboll, president of comScore MediaMetrix, noted that the holiday shopping season usually starts early online, and this year is certainly no exception-but there is also evidence of renewed consumer confidence and interest in shopping online. "Bolstered by an increase in consumer confidence and continued reliance on the web as a shopping and planning resource, we'll clearly see continued momentum in shopping and related categories as the holidays approach," Daboll said. ComScore's other major announcement yesterday was for their new reporting service called Ad Focus Reporting. The new service for media buyers and planners will help them monitor the actions of different audience segments so that they may target them more efficiently; it is designed to correspond to the way in which advertising is actually packaged and sold. The service is designed to make it easier to view distinct audience segments of individual sites and properties that carry advertising. For example, in addition to viewing the total audience of individual sites and properties, Ad Focus Reporting allows the user to examine visitors to the home pages of select sites (such as AOL, MSN and Yahoo) that currently package home-page-only impressions, or geo-targeted sites (such as Tribune Interactive Los Angeles and Boston.com). In addition, advertising networks, such as Advertising.com and Burst!, are available in the Ad Focus list so media planners, buyers and advertisers can consider these networks side-by-side with other online media.