StrongMail Survey Wrongly Paints Bleak Picture

It’s one thing for a vendor to sponsor a self-serving study that is designed to promote the benefits of using its services. It’s quite another to paint an inaccurate and damning picture of its would-be customer base in the process.

This is exactly what e-mail insourcing technology provider StrongMail did yesterday with a survey concluding that marketers are cavalier with the way they handle customer data.

The study—which was aimed at pointing out the supposed dangers of outsourcing e-mail services, and extolling the benefits of bringing e-mail in-house—concluded there is a huge disconnect between what privacy professionals think is going on with their firms’ customer data and what marketers actually say is going on.

Whereas 75% of privacy professionals believe their companies limit the amount of personal information they share with third parties, just 40% of marketers believe so, according to the study conducted by the Ponemon Institute on behalf of StrongMail.

“In fact, marketers report a willingness to share such personal information as credit card number (45%), debit card number (39%), Social Security number (29%), and bank account/routing number (17%),” said a release touting the study.

Also, 80% of the marketers surveyed said they share e-mail addresses with third parties, according to the study.

But wait a minute: Don’t most e-mailers use service providers? Wouldn’t they have to share their customers’ addresses with those service providers in order to get their messages sent?

StrongMail’s study was about the risks associated with outsourcing, not marketing and advertising. As a result, respondents were saying they share this information with their vendors, not necessarily third-party advertisers.

StrongMail never specified who these marketers said they were sharing data with, so various writers—Forbes columnist Andy Greenberg, for one high-profile example—understandably took it to mean marketers were sharing their customers’ information with anyone willing to buy it.

“That disconnect may be one source of the annoying spam that plagues inboxes,” Greenberg wrote. “Just 44% of marketers surveyed believe their organizations were in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act, a law that requires marketers to request permission to send e-mail messages, disclose the messages' source and offer an opt-out function.”

Never mind that he’s wrong about the permission aspect of Can Spam. Because of the way StrongMail and the Ponemon Institute presented their study’s findings, Greenberg drew a highly damaging—and dead wrong—conclusion about the state of mainstream e-mail marketing.

Here is the biggest problem with StrongMail’s study. Privacy zealots are on a never-ending quest to find evidence that marketers can’t be trusted with sensitive information about their customers.

These so-called privacy advocates—who usually can more accurately be described as anti-marketing activists—can’t cite any actual damage that has ever occurred to anyone as a result of a marketing campaign using personally identifiable information, so they’re left to rely on evidence indicating that something bad <ital>could<ital>happen.

StrongMail’s study and the resulting coverage in Forbes and other outlets is a goldmine for privacy zealots to go to the Federal Trade Commission and Congress and say: “See? Marketers admit they can’t be trusted with people’s information. This proves it’s time for stiffer regulations on marketing and advertising.” when it has proved nothing of the sort.

In a telephone interview yesterday, Ponemon Institute founder Larry Ponemon and Bill Wagner, executive vice president of business operations for StrongMail, said they agreed the study as reported presented a picture of the marketing profession they hadn’t intended.

To his credit, Ponemon said he would speak to Forbes’s Greenberg to try and set the record straight. He also offered to do another study aimed at getting a truer picture of marketers’ data-handling practices.

In return, I agreed to publicize the findings of the next study, no matter the results.