Sponsored Content WEBINAR: ELECTION 2008: E-mail Tips from a Political Insider   WEBINAR: Becoming the Illusionist: The Magic of Using "Brand" to Drive Response without Results Disappearing in the Process   WEBINAR: Score and Win Through Cooperation   TOOLS OF THE TRADE: Holiday's are prime-time for email marketing - maximize your ROI by getting to the inbox   ON DEMAND WEBINAR--MASTER CLASS: High Performance Online and Off-line Strategies for Large Scale Customer Acquisition   FREE WHITE PAPER - Direct Mail and the Internet Find any supplier you need - agencies, CRM, fulfillment, lists, e-commerce, paper, printers, telemarketing, and more. Featured Categories Lists and Data Telemarketing Database Marketing E-commerce Web Marketing Agency & Creative Services Print, Production & Paper Lists and Data Processing :: view all categories Get free access to more than 50,000 list data cards - one of the most comprehensive databases in the industry. >> Search Now DIRECT Buzz Blog Webinars Buyer's Guide Calculators JobZone ListFinder Promo Calendar Research Store E-Newsletters Print Magazine This Month in Direct Magazine Deal With It Direct had a full house for this year's list roundtable. Considering all the additional responsibilities on brokers' plates, that's impressive... See Full July Issue

Anyone who has ever turned off a favorite radio station because they’ve heard a given song one too many times will understand my reaction to Adam Cohen’s recent New York Times editorial “The Already Big Thing on the Internet: Spying on Users” (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/05/opinion/05sat4.html).

“It’s not paranoia: they really are spying on you,” writes Cohen, who later alleges “The driving force behind this prying is commerce.”

No, dammit, it’s not. We all know the chorus, folks, so let’s sing it together: Marketers rarely isolate granular information on a single, identifiable individual. What marketers do – or, more specifically, what marketers program nonjudgmental, unthinking machines to do – is isolate traits common to their desired targets, and present hopefully relevant ads to groups of lookalike prospects.

What Cohen is describing is a form of cyberstalking and potential harassment, which is very different from what online marketers do. Any institution can assign human monitors to ferret out damaging information on a very small number of individuals. Manpower requirements don’t really allow for much more than that.

Throwing e-commerce into an editorial that focuses on online information abuses by the government, or potential employers or blackmailers (three groups about which the editorial sounds an alarm), is dirty pool.

Cohen further writes “If George Orwell had lived in the Internet age, he could have painted a grim picture of how Web monitoring could be used to promote authoritarianism. There is no need for the neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens’ every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.”

Indeed. And if Gertrude Stein had lived in the Internet age, she could have painted a picture of the succession of fancy names for DM practices by writing “a database marketing strategy is a database marketing strategy is a database marketing strategy.” Aren’t speculative statements fun?

The Times ran this editorial because a relatively new term – behavioral targeting – is being applied to practices online marketers have been performing for more than a decade, and offline marketers have been undertaking for more than a century.

Dragging George Orwell into this debate is a form of literary bait and switch. Orwell’s “1984” was about total government control, not about a relentless drive to sell toothpaste (or whatever). The fabled telescreens of that dystopian novel were used to monitor citizens’ activities. But throughout the entire book there isn’t a single mention of the telescreens carrying a commercial.

Not one.

I don’t fault Cohen for holding these opinions. If there is blame to be assigned, it’s to an industry that allows these sorts of statements in the general press to go unchallenged. The marketing community never seems to get equal time to rebut these statements, nor does the community seem to ask for it.

I doubt Cohen was personally contacted by a calm, rational industry representative who offered to provide an opposing view after this piece ran. As a result, opinions held by Cohen and other writers become calcified, and the same lack of nuance crops up the next time they consider the evils of behavioral targeting, or whatever the next buzzword is going to be.

The direct marketing community could use a centralized entity to challenge such misconceptions. Surely marketers would be willing to pony up – just to pull a number out of the air – $1,500 or more a year (on a sliding scale, based on their direct marketing expenditures) for such an organization? DM agencies and suppliers, which would be much more deeply affected by letting these editorials go unchallenged, could be charged, I dunno, $3,100 and up, annually, based on their total revenue from providing direct marketing services. And the organization could give nonprofit members a break, starting their annual fees at, hmm, how does $650 a year sound?

Yeah, I definitely think there’s room for such an organization, which as part of its mission actively and aggressively challenges misconceptions among the general press. Anyone got any suggestions for names?

To respond to the opinions in this column, please contact richard.levey@penton.com