Live From DMA08: There’s No Dearth of DM Regulation

Many American marketers feel that they’re overly regulated.

But they’re no worse off than their peers in other countries. They may even have it better.

Take South Korea. It passed a data protection law, but it did “a disastrous job,” said Lisa Watson, chairman of the Direct Marketing Association of Singapore.

The problem is that companies are required to purge any mention of a person who has chosen to opt out. “So next time address is purged, there’s no clue they’ve opted out,” said Lisa Watson, chairman of the Direct Marketing Association of Singapore.

And marketers should expect more of the same. “Even Vietnam is crafting data protection legislation,” Watson said, speaking at the U.S. DMA’s DMA08 conference in Las Vegas.

Watson called Asian regulation “a moving target,” and noted that not every country has identical rules.

Singapore, despite its reputation as a no-nonsense society, has a reasonable anti-spam law, patterned on the U.S. Can Spam Act. Offenders can be fined $25 per e-mail or text message, with a cap of $1 million.

“We’re allowed to spam,” Watson said, using a perhaps an unfortunate term.
“It’s an opt-out regime, not a criminal-based regime.”

She added that nobody “wants to go to prison in Singapore, or have any lashes with the cane.”

Watson described the Asian continent as “the biggest and smallest, richest and poorest, the best and the worst.”

Then there’s Europe. The laws there are “getting more and more difficult to live by for direct marketers,” said Alastair Tempest, director general of FEDMA.

Why? Because marketers get blamed for everything.

Case in point: Binge drinking on weekends in Great Britain.

“You go out with your mates on Friday or Saturday and drink until you fall down,” Tempest said. “It’s great fun.”

But legislators blame advertising for the excess, he added. The answer? “Control advertising.”

Then there’s the recent case in Germany. Data was stolen from a call center and used illegally “Who gets it in the neck? Marketers.

As they should be, European country are protective of children. But the European parliament recently declared that children are “anyone under the age of 18.

“It’s typical of older people to think that young people need to be controlled,” Tempest said.

In a similar way, regulators would like to introduce consumer redress. That would take the form of “class actions, which we Europeans don’t like,” he continued.

Tempest turned to Charles Prescott, a vice president with the U.S. Direct Marketing Association and said, “We think you can keep your laws with class actions.”

The most restrictive countries for direct marketers: Russia, Poland, Romania, Greece and Spain.

Several other countries are “threatened—among them, England, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Belgium and the Netherlands.”

The good news is that most privacy laws are not properly enforced, if only because “government bodies are some of the worst offenders when it comes to breaking them,” Tempest said.