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Read more commentary from Ken Magill

The Direct Marketing Association is not taking the Email Experience Council’s recent spamming of its membership in violation of its own privacy policy lightly and is planning fairly significant changes in the way the EEC is managed, according to sources.

“The DMA is processing this and taking it really seriously. They just move slowly,” wrote once source in an e-mail exchange with this newsletter. “But something large-ish is almost certainly going to happen.”

Multiple sources who are EEC members told this newsletter that conversations with DMA representatives have left them confident the DMA will take some sort of action on the EEC to prevent another SNAFU like the one that took place last month.

In April, the EEC facilitated the spamming of its members with at least three irrelevant commercial e-mails from co-chair Jeanniey Mullen’s employer, Zinio Publishing. The messages were a prospecting effort for women’s lifestyle publication VIV Magazine. Though the EEC claimed members’ addresses weren’t sold or rented, the messages came from VIV Magazine’s servers in direct violation of the EEC’s own privacy policy.

Moreover the e-mails failed to include a proper opt-out link, making them a violation of the federal Can Spam Act and a source of deep embarrassment to the EEC’s members.

The EEC attempted to spin the fiasco as a case of good intentions gone bad, making the odd claim that they were just trying to do something nice for Earth Day.

The incident was a case of good intentions gone bad, but it was the good intentions of the DMA, not the EEC.

When the DMA acquired the EEC last July, executives made a conscious decision to take a hands-off approach to the group and let it grow on its own, sources say. The decision was an attempt to avoid smothering the EEC in hopes it wouldn’t suffer the same the fate of the Association for Interactive Marketing, which the DMA acquired in 1998 and which was dead by 2003, sources said.

However, it would be unfair to blame the DMA for AIM’s demise. AIM was as much a victim of the dot-com economic implosion as anything else. At its peak, AIM had 500 members, three quarters of which were not DMA members.

When the economy began to tank in 2001 and dot-coms began to vaporize, AIM was hit particularly hard.

In any case, the DMA’s hands-off approach to the EEC has apparently backfired. As a result, the DMA is expected to take more control of the group, according to sources.

When this is going to happen is unclear.

“They have to dot all their ‘i’s and cross their ‘t’s,” said one source.

The question is whether or not the DMA will be able to prevent more fiascos at the EEC like last month’s spamming incident while allowing the group to maintain its dynamism.