Richard Thomas, the Information Commission, rather than the actor who played John Boy in The Walton’s, has decided that jail sentences for individuals are not appropriate for data breaches. He is asking for unlimited fines instead. As Amy Winehouse ought to say a little more often...no, no, NO!
For goodness sake, what is the point of fining M&S, or a High Street bank? Even if the fine is large, say £50m, it is the shareholders and customers who will end up paying. The CEO will still leave with a golden handshake. A fine, Mr Thomas, it not much of a deterrent.
Look at the Premier League. Fining Roman Abramovich a few quid for his club tapping up a player, or for his players chasing the referee around the pitch like hounds after a fox, did not really work. It was the equivalent of the price of a cup of coffee to him. Fining West Ham £5.5m for signing a player owned by someone else – rather than docking them three points, which would have seen them relegated – was seen as a triumph for the club.
The commercial organisations who have fessed up since datagate are all premier league players, so the analogy is pertinent. If you fine them, no one is going to feel any pain. No one will take the rules seriously. But if the board director responsible might spend a few weeks in the Scrubs you can bet your bottom dollar that our personal data will be treated like the crown jewels.
And...just out of interest...who would the fines go to? Would it be split amongst the poor saps whose data ended up in the public domain through no fault of their own...or would it end up in Golden Brown’s coffers, along with all the speeding fines, parking tickets and the like?
Remember, John Boy lived in the depression ravaged Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and he knew the value of a dollar. Richard Thomas wants the power to punish, but he should be looking for the means to deter. Fining the business will not deter the fat cats even if it comes straight out of their bonus.
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The Technology for Marketing and Advertising Exhibition moves into Earl’s Court 2 on February 12-13th. Good Grief, I feel obliged to go. Even though no exhibition has really warmed the cockles of my heart since I found myself sentenced to the Ideal Home Exhibition for 33 days running in 1983.
These days, I think exhibitions only truly work for the exhibitor if you have something new and exciting to say or promote. And ever since I stumbled into the direct marketing firmament, finding something truly new and exciting to see has been a rare experience. Hence all those meet at the bar opportunities.
Still, it’s a day out, isn’t it? A chance to meet a few faces and spill Eurofizz over them. And in this particular field, I feel the chance of learning something along the way.
I am also hoping against hope that this show...and the IDMF which follows at the same venue in April...will have gone some way towards embracing the exhibition as a networking event.
Not long ago, in another life, I sponsored the bar at one of these things. Great branding and everyone spilled their alocopops on my coasters, in front of our stand. Mostly recruitment consultants, of course. Mostly talking to my team. And when you wanted to have a chat to a client in comfort, away from the stand, there was consequently nowhere to go.
So, it’s a new year, and maybe I will be pleasantly surprised. If you go too, stop and say hello.
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Well, I am, a little. Big hairy ones. It always put me off being a Blue Peter presenter, because sooner or later you had to hold one and pretend to be brave. Now, the Internet has spawned its own version of arachnophobia. Using spiders to capture data is looked down upon by many, and like most phobia’s, this attitude makes little sense.
The wonders of modern technology, eh?
Set a little program loose and you can find out all sorts of things about web sites. And in the B2B world, this provides data owners and suppliers with an interesting little dilemma.
Capturing contact data in this fashion is seen as somehow indecent. There is no opt-out, let alone opt-in, and therefore some people get very sniffy about the whole process.
Company websites are shop windows.
These shop windows are in the public domain. I do not see a problem with collecting this data. It is how you use it afterwards that poses the moral dilemmas.
Personally, I think this is a perfectly legitimate way to collect generic emails. And as generic emails often perform better than named contacts, these have a value.
Named contacts without opt-ins, should be handled with extreme care. I can think of a number of things I could do with them, none of which could be called abuse.
Anyone else got an opinion on the spiders? I think it could be an interesting debate?
Royal Mail is recruiting experts (by a tender process!) to increase its commitment to improving the effectiveness of DM campaigns. Nice of them, isn’t it? Except they are really trying to provide a SME service, through commercial partners, in competition with those (un)lucky enough not to be asked to tender. Note to Adam Crozier – you run a postal delivery service, and you are owned by the government. Why not get that right, before you start competing with your best customers?
To be fair, I had a sniff of what RM were trying to do last year. Whoever their panel of experts (meaning commercial partners) are, RM are trying to make a penny or two out of SME’s, providing white-labelled DM services from one ‘trusted’ source.
It is a simple case of RM trying to make some money, just as the BBC do online, in an effort to make their income from the public purse run to a few more conferences in Barbados, or wherever Adam prefers to party.
Nothing wrong with that, per say. No one wants more competition, but this is a free market economy and fair play to the lad. However, I could give him a few suggestions on how to improve the effectiveness of DM campaigns.
Stop losing over 1m letters a year. Stop adding to the junk mail flames by delivering any old D2D (of which I usually get at least 3 copies, as the postie tries to rid himself of the load halfway up the hill) and stop increasing costs.
Actually, I am a defender of our postal service. I have said before in B2B101 that one of the consequences of greater restrictions on DM will be the death of the RM as we know it. But just how much is RM investing in this partnership?
This is essentially a government department, remember. They exist to deliver letters and parcels to every house, office or factory in the good old UK. They have no remit to bugger around trying to be a portal for SME DM campaigns.
So, unless I have the right to start delivering my own letters, I would humbly suggest that RM concentrate their considerable resources on running a better, cheaper postal service.
Online behaviour is fascinating me. Especially this networking stuff. Be it social, or business, there is a plethora of them, but whatever happened to the idea of a community? Brand Republic is a valiant attempt, but do we know where we are going too? Is there anyone out there?Blogging is clearly fashionable. And you can see why a publisher like Haymarket would encourage a community based around its assets. I made a personal commitment when the opportunity to blog on here arose, because I felt I had something to say. My personal target is to post something every working day, both responding to news items and pontificating about B2B marketing. I also try to be active on the forums. Over the last six months, more regulars have appeared. It is growing and I am aware that there are plans afoot to take things further. Brand Republic sees itself as a portal, and a damned good one, in my opinion. Free to access, full of content, I have learned a lot more than I have contributed. So why isn’t it used more? Why aren’t more people active? This should be MySpace for the marketing/advertising/agency world. I am not privy to the visitor hits, but I am sure there are more silent users than we see. George Parker recently threatened to stop blogging on here...and got more comments for that than he had for anything else he posted in Madscam! What do you guys think? Let’s give Bill and the team some positive feedback! Obviously, I get this month’s award for sucking up J
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Hilariously, the MoD has decided to stop their staff taking laptops home, so that no one can steal them, and the personal data included therein. Excuse me for being a bit pedantic here, but isn’t the whole idea of a laptop the fact that they are portable? Maybe I do miss that Oxbridge education after all – simple solutions to simple problems like this are worth their weight in gold.
As far as kneejerk reactions go, that takes the chocolate digestive. These people are tasked with defending this nation, for goodness sake. Presumably, as the tax payer has paid for these officials to have portable computers, they need to work remotely some or all of the time?
The questions should revolve around what was such sensitive data doing on the laptop in the first place, and how good was the encryption supposedly applied to the files.
The answer to the first one is probably convenience or negligence. But if the answer to the second is ‘James Bond would find it hard to get into that file’, the problem may be less serious than the tabloids think.
Again, it all comes down to a lack of procedures. Files including such an incredible level of personal details on people who are or might become members of our armed forces are obviously sensitive. Letting them be downloaded to a laptop should be a breach of procedures. Then leaving the said laptop in your car is adding insult to injury.
Interestingly enough, just to amuse the officials at the MoD who banned laptops leaving the building, I have only ever lost one laptop on my watch. Not even mine. It belonged to someone who had left, and I was sort of babysitting it. I left it on his desk to work on the next day, and in the morning, it was gone.
They are portable you see, people steal them.
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B2B data is a confusing market. Dozens, if not hundreds, of suppliers, most of whom are rather coy about their sources, and the vast majority of whom license their core data from somewhere. Blended data has become the norm, ostensibly to add greater value and depth to core data sets. From there, smoke and mirrors take over, and before you know it, none of us knows where we are.
It is now almost eleven years since I first stumbled into the B2B data market, and it has taken me that long to be able to see the wood for the trees. Either that makes me particularly slow on the uptake, or the complexities of licensing relationships take some time to unravel. You will be surprised to hear that I subscribe to the latter position.
In reality, there are only four sources of core data; Companies House, Business Directories, credit information and tele-marketing. It is therefore logical that the big names in B2B data are credit businesses who license CH data and blend it all together with directory datasets that they either own or license, and then do a bit of tele-marketing on the side. This difficult blending process is necessary because CH and Credit data does not come in a format suitable for direct marketing – trading names, trading addresses, telephone numbers and contacts all need to be matched and captured to produce a marketable dataset.
Although some of the core data is ‘owned’ in this scenario, it is unusable for DM without licensed overlays, so the ownership is diluted and watered down.
Only directory information comes ready to go in a marketable form, and so one can argue that the only true uber data owners are business directories.
Databases built by purely tele-marketing are never that large, because of the costs of data capture and verification. B2B data quality varies so much because of the costs and difficulties of verification set against the rate of decay inherent in the dataset. B2B data decays at a rate of around 3% per month on average, and the various means of verification can never keep up the pace. However, most reputable suppliers manage to provide fit for purpose data within universally accepted industry standards. And most clients don’t care the cost of a first class stamp about where their data comes from, or who owns it, as long as it meets those standards and the cost falls within their budgets. It has always been thus.
Except that, events are overtaking us. Environmental pressures are not going to go away and the war against junk mail feeds the tabloid’s hunger for a popular campaign to crusade for. My network of the great and the good all seem to feel that the DM industry will be forced to use opt-in data in the future. Maybe even the near future. B2B, the distant cousin of that unruly child B2C, will be caught up in the eye of the storm.
Therefore, it is time to debate the options and prepare for the future. For instance, what would happen if the government put a DM opt-in on the Companies House registration documents, in much the same way as they did with the electoral roll? What happens if no one was allowed to publish a company name in a directory without a specific opt-in to do so? Rather than sticking our heads in the sand and crying ‘fowl’ we need to start solving these issues now, or the next trick will be a disappearing act for a number of traditional data suppliers.
Marketing is a dark art, there is no point in denying it. The marketing budget is never, or at least very rarely, set in stone. Our friends in the pin stripe suits see it as fat, ready to be plundered if times get tough. DM is supposed to be the antidote to this attitude, but seats at the top table for marketers are few and far between...is this ever going to change?
Some of my best friends are accountants. Really. As well as my brother-in-law and my late father-in-law. Yes, I know, it worries me too.
Having sat on boards with them, argued with them, cajoled them, begged them and ignored them, I know what they are like.
Some, of course, are more commercial than others, but few see marketing as an investment. Sales and marketing numbers are always taken with a huge pinch of salt.
Far too many accountants are happy enough to see the sales director talk the sales numbers up, but rarely allow the marketing team to do the same thing.
The thinking goes something like ‘the bigger the targets, the more they will achieve’ against ‘this is a cost, slash and burn.’
Measuring marketing expenditure is hard. DM is supposed to be the exception, because it can show a visible return on investment, but the truth is that other activities alongside DM can affect how well any campaign performs.
Brand awareness, for example, can be the difference between the creative going straight in the bin or being read.
Big companies struggle with this stuff, so how the hell the other 98.4% of businesses are supposed to manage is a mystery to me.
My own answer to these problems is always basically the same. Agree a business plan at the highest possible level, with short, medium and long term goals. Embed marketing investment as part of the plan, and describe what each element of the plan is trying to achieve. Identify crucial expenditure, and try and ring fence it from the red pen. Agree a roadmap for the business, and regularly report on how far the business is along that road.
Like my journey around the M25 and up and down the M40, there are always hold ups. The odd roadworks, the occasional accident and the bad weather. Each of these causes the accountants to rein in the outgoings. But on a journey from A–B, or G-H, it is easier to assess the damage of not investing in the future. Then it becomes a question of what the short-term pain is, offset against how long a delay it will cause for the business moving forwards in the future.
The essential thing for all marketers these days is to be commercial. Think commercial, act commercial, and never make the mistake of getting caught up in the excitement of it all. I had a brief spell working for EMAP in the nineties. The gulf between the marketing teams (including all the journalists who naturally gravitate to the side with the most free lunches) and the accountants was so wide the Jumbo jet would need to refuel halfway across. On one side it was all FHM and The Box, flash suits, mad parties and sex, drugs and rock and roll, and on the other it was a balance sheet and a permanent scowl.
Big or small, disciplines need to work together, and marketing is a discipline, the same as bean-counting is.
Getting recognition of that at board level is the hardest part of the job, so go on, snuggle up to your accountant today...you know it makes sense.
Having recently moved to Microsoft Office 2007 on my shiny new laptop, the amount of mail going into my junk folder, and not appearing properly has sharply increased. This is due to a design change, apparently. What works in earlier versions of Outlook, will not necessarily work in new ones. This is a timely reminder that our future is not in our own hands.
Big Brother may not be the government. Bill Gates and his competitors in silicon valley might be much more dangerous.
Direct Marketing is heading online for the best of reasons, of course. Less waste, more interactivity, better measurement yada yada yada. But email and the Internet only works because Microsoft, Google, Yahoo et al make it work, or allow it to work.
This 2007 problem only just became apparent to me. I am sure others are ahead of me on this, but one thing is for sure, most businesses have not yet reached Microsoft Office 2007.
Because of glitches, and the cost of upgrading servers and the like, most people are on earlier versions. Microsoft Vista is years away from reaching the majority of the business community for the same reasons. But, as 2007 becomes more common, the email problems will only increase.
Big Bill clearly has the power to shape our future. This would not be so much of a problem if we could have a dialogue with him, and work together, but I suspect that will not be the case.
The DMA have more chance of dinner at 10 Downing Street than they have of discussing the future with Bill. Above us all, there is a continuing battle for the billions of online revenue. Microsoft might own the PC software market, but Google seem to dominate everything else.
As these two giants circle each other, searching for the killer blow, we feed off the crumbs they allow to drop from their plates. I suspect Microsoft could stop DM email campaigns at the flick of a button. It is just not currently in their interests to do so.
Watch out when it is.
Email outstripped snail mail in Q4 2007. With environmental pressures on hard copy DM rising and all the fuss about junk mail (as opposed to spam), not to mention a stripped-down postal service under Adam Crozier, are we all about to go online?
Not until the data catches up, is the simple answer. In the consumer world, big lists are being collected, but the amount of lifestyle data appended rarely compares with the strength of the postcode.
In B2B, although numbers are rising, only a fraction of desktops are being reached, and despite all the advantages of e-marketing the data pool is not deep enough, or wide enough, to take over yet. It is more of a data puddle than a pool.
The answer to my own question lies in the success or failure of data capture and opt-in processes. The best B2B lists on market at the moment number 3-500k, out of an average business universe of 2.5m businesses. Roughly 20% of those email addresses are generic.
So Postman Pat has a few years yet. Registering emails for DM is partially a question of confidence, and partially a question of what you receive in return.
It is also an attitude of mind. For some reason, a person who gives out their direct dial telephone number and business address without a second thought often demurs when it comes to releasing an email address.
Personally, I think it is part of my address, and maybe the most important part, but clearly the market does not yet agree with me.
Here is my prediction for the future with regards to emails. Firstly, as a consumer, expect a compulsory double opt-in if you want ‘free’ access to a number of services online. This will include social networking sites, email accounts, popular news or sports news sites and various other communities. If you refuse to click the relevant box, expect to start paying a little something for these services.
Secondly, as a business email user, start to use your email address as a transaction. An online presence is about traffic, because traffic drives online advertising revenues and pay-per-clicks. Free access to directories, information sources and even credit information in return for opting into DM, both online and offline, is not a bad deal.
Then Postman Pat had better start looking for an alternative career.
No one likes change. Certainly not the DM industry, I fear. The idea that compulsory opt-in might be on the horizon horrifies many and the doom and gloom stories about the end of the world being nigh are starting to hit the pages of the trade press. Good, we should have a debate, but calm down dears, it is not as bad as you think.
Iain Lovatt, writing eloquently in Data Strategy in January, predicted multiple redundancies and general catastrophe. I agree with Iain, there will be some fallout, but that is no bad thing. In the long run, the quality of data and the relationship between DM and the public will improve.
Talking purely B2B, we have to remember that there are few data owners. You can count them on one hand, I think, although I am ready to be proved wrong. Most data suppliers blend and merge data from several sources. They are licensee’s, not owners. They talk a good game, but they have no direct relationship with their database.
So in an opt-in world, a number of data suppliers will disappear. Data owners will want to protect their opt-in relationships, however these are gained, and will not license to all and sundry.
No bad thing. A lot of charlatans and rogues will go away, and owners will deal with reputable partners to enhance and improve datasets built on a solid foundation of opt-in.
Countyweb.com have owned an opt-in database for 12 years. Opt-in is therefore nothing new - it is just not valued at present.
It will be. We need to embrace the possibilities before we are forced to embrace them, so that we can have some say along the way.
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On the Radio 4 news the other morning I heard yet another faceless Labour minister sounding off about the success of biometric identity cards for immigration candidates applying to enter the UK. Ahead of schedule, below budget, superior security, you know the kind of thing. Oh and we might put a bill before parliament in a year or so, to pave the way for compulsory identity cards for all. Am I the only one who thinks that, after datagate, this might be a trifle premature?
Having stopped some 4000 people entering the country on the grounds that they tried to disguise their identities, without managing to leave the data open to all in their waste paper basket, Golden Brown and his cronies have decided that they are capable of putting together an Uber database of some 70m records...as long as they can force it through the house.
That in itself seems unlikely. Labour rebels will rebel, Nick Clegg will shout foul from the liberal rooftops, and Call Me Dave will have all the ammunition he needs to shoot the whole thing down in flames.
Hence the vague ‘maybe next year’. In twelve months time, maybe Golden will have turned the polls back in his favour. Maybe he will have a string of triumphs to restore public confidence...and maybe he will embark on a database that really will threaten us all.
This frightens the hell out of me. Good grief, an organisation who cannot even encrypt a file holding extremely personal data on every man, woman and child. It is a recipe for disaster.
And it pains me to say that, because personally I do not find the idea of an identity card an insult to my personal liberties. To me, it is an extension of a passport and a driving licence. Adding finger-prints or whatever to that dataset does not scare me. As long as I have some confidence that it is being done properly.
And there is the rub.
Before we let our elected representatives create this potential nightmare, we should demand a lot of safeguards. I am sure the debate will revolve around civil liberties, but it should focus on competence.
Maybe the only way to save direct marketing is to embrace opt-in. Heresy to some, especially those who cannot see a way to do it themselves, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes. The trick is going to be gaining trust and offering something in return for the right to communicate.
Our online directory gave me the idea, I must admit. It is an opt-in process. You register for your free entry and you tick the box. Most people do, at any rate. They opt-in because they want to appear on the directory, and although they are under no pressure to do so they accept the marketing because they are in the frame of mind to market themselves, I think.
As of now, we do not refuse to put anyone on the directory if they opt-out, we just do not sell their data - but it would be easy enough to do. We could, and probably should, charge these people a fee for their entry because of their decision.
It seems fair enough – there is no such thing as a free lunch. So it makes sense to me that, in an opt-in world, databases will be built by offering something in return.
This would easily work in the consumer market as well. If you want free access to a social networking site, why not demand an opt-in first? If the hapless punter refuses to tick the box, charge a fee. Following this train of thought, DM would not die. It might even get stronger, because a transaction takes place.
No consumer or business would be able to feel abused or hard done by – they would understand what they were getting in return.
It could work offline as well, I suspect. Free newspapers, for instance. The real money is in the advertising and inserts, so building a database makes sense for both sides.
Obviously, being a data owner with an established opt-in process leaves me open to accusations of self-interest, but this notion has rather crept up on me. We need to build email lists that work.
That is our best route to being green, but there is a general reluctance to sign up for loads of advertising in your inbox, in both B2C and B2B. Which is a bit funny, when you think about it.
Email accounts are free. The service provider is looking for traffic and add on sales in return for providing us all with an excellent tool we all use. If list owners are sensible, build trust and offer something tangible in return, we could start to win hearts and minds for a change, and make DM a truly acceptable pastime once more.
Not the excellent BBC production, although I recommend it wholeheartedly, but good old-fashioned common sense. Because it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single data buyer in possession of a budget must be in search of a deal.
Why? Buying purely on price makes no sense to me. The buying decision should always revolve around the issue of being fit for purpose.
Will the data reach the spot? Will it allow the creative, or the sales message, to work with the target audience?
In a market where the data will cost a third of the stamp, or half of a telephone call, is price really important?
Cost-effectiveness is important. Value for money is important. Not price.
I am sick of being told that another supplier has come in at x when we have quoted y. Not because I am unwilling to compete on price, but because quality is rarely if ever a consideration – or so it sometimes seems.
Just because someone says that their data is top quality does not make it so. Buyers need to ask some searching questions before they buy on price.
Such as:
- Where does the data come from?
- How and how often is the data cleansed?
- Are standard suppressions applied?
- Has the right selection criteria been applied?
Not hard questions for the reputable supplier. Even so, many will answer like Golden Brown under the glare of Paxman or Humphreys.
The fact is you cannot compare chicken eggs with quail eggs. They taste different. They perform differently.
Personally, when operating as a buyer, I try to select the product or service that best suits my needs and then try to make it fit my budget.
Too often, the data market seems to work the other way around.
According to a new survey by Softscan 97.02% of emails sent in December were unsolicited mail. Gosh, that’s a lot. Is that all spam? Nudge, nudge, Brian, say no more.Surveys often annoy me. This one may well be entirely genuine, as I am only going by the press coverage, but I would like to know more about how they distinguish between Spam and direct marketing. From the use of the word ‘unsolicited’ I fear we might be getting tarred with the same brush, yet again. My own experience, both at home and at work, is that there is less spam around. I use my personal email a lot, almost deliberately, to see what gets through my broadband suppliers spam technology, as well as my own pathetic defences. I use it to register for everything I do online, and make little attempt to hide it, because I want people to be able to contact me. On average, I get about 2 or 3 emails a day which I would call spam. Viagra, dodgy investments and new ways to enlarge my manhood, mostly. Nothing new. At work, armed with the best defences a small business can buy, hardly anything skips through to my inbox. Unsolicited mail, on the other hand, is quite prevalent. Some of it I can trace back to things I signed up for, but quite a lot of it, I can’t. None of it is offensive, and quite a lot of it is reasonably well targeted, and I do not count that as spam. If anyone from Softscan reads this, I’d be interested to hear some more. The old days of inbox filling nightmares are over, in my personal experience. Scare stories like this do the industry no good at all.
Hugh Bessant
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