Press release:

Marketers now face prison if they consistently ignore the wishes of consumers who do not wish to be contacted for marketing purposes.

The CPUT Regulations include 31 banned practices that will always be considered to be unfair. One of these is ‘making persistent and unwanted solicitations by telephone, fax, email or other remote media except in circumstances and to the extent justified to enforce a contractual obligation’. Breaching this banned practice is a criminal offence and carries with it a maximum fine of £5000 currently and or a term of imprisonment not exceeding two years.

The term ‘other remote media’ has yet to be defined, but there is the argument that this could include direct mail sent through the post. If this is so, the Mailing Preference Service will have legislative backing providing greater protection for its subscribers.

Janine Paterson, Legal and Public Affairs Advisor at the DMA, warns: “Companies ignoring the TPS and persistently calling numbers registered on the scheme have got away lightly. Now however they could face prison if they continually call numbers against the consumer’s wishes. The DMA welcomes this new legislation and is advising members on this and other elements of CPUT Regulations and the Business Protection from Misleading Marketing Regulations. ”

Companies ignoring TPS face prison warns DMA

The Postal Service doesn’t like the term “junk mail”, and for obvious reasons, neither do the people who use direct mailings to sell their products. So it might come as a surprise to find that the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) uses the term in advertisements for its “dmachoice.org” web site. One ad says “Postal service junk mail Choose Only The Catalogs You Want! Free Service Supported by the USPS”. Another reads “Stop Paper Junk Mail” Reduce Mailbox Clutter- Sign Up for DMA’s Mail Preference Service!”

Interestingly enough, the term “junk mail” doesn’t appear on the dmachoice site itself, although it is included in the keyword code for several pages. Keywords are embedded in the HTML code of web pages, and can be used by search engines, but aren’t visible to a person viewing the page.

Press release from stopthejunkmail.com:

Consumers over the age of 65 are being targeted with the most junk mail according to stopthejunkmail.com’s 2007 second quarter survey. Results show that the over 40% of surveyed participants are over the age of 65 years old, the baby boomer demographic.

Stopthejunkmail.com releases their consumer opinion survey quarterly in an effort to determine how best to reduce the environmental impact of postal junk mail. The survey is taken anonymously by a nationwide sampling of consumers to accurately show attitudes toward stopping junk mail.

The survey also asks consumers what they believe are direct mail’s “worst offenders” with banks at the top of the list followed by catalogs. The top three cancelled catalogs during the last quarter were Frontgate, Ballard Designs and Home Decorators Collection.

Jim Logan explains the difference.

Jim Logan - 10 Tips To Improve Your B-B and B-G Direct Mail Campaigns

ABC’s Good Morning America has a rip ‘n’ read style story on “junk mail”- a couple of un-referenced statistics (”Every American receives 17 trees worth of junk mail per year”), and telephone numbers to call to get on do not mail lists.

The irony is that to read the story online, you have to get past a pop-up ad for a restaurant. Once you get to the story, there are six separate ads on the page, two of them animated, all competing with the photo of correspondent Elisabeth Leamy doing her best naughty Mona Lisa pose. I guess I should give them credit for the absence of those annoying Flash pop-ups.

But if advertising arriving in my mailbox is ‘junk’, what does she call the ads that arrive with her story? And maybe more importantly, what about the 16 minutes or more of ads every hour on ABC Television?

Could that be part of the reason that network television viewership is dropping even faster than say, first class mail volume?

ABC News: Don’t Let Junk Mail Weigh You Down