Should junk mail writers be licensed? How about newspaper reporters?

There is a reason for government licensing of certain jobs and professions. You wouldn’t want just anybody to hang out a shingle, claim he’s an MD, and take out your appendix.

You wouldn’t want some unknowledgeable oaf to represent you in court on a capital charge. (Although it sometimes happens with court-appointed lawyers.) Or some amateur architect doing a redesign of your home that ends up accidentally removing a supporting wall.

The rule of thumb is pretty simple. When life, liberty or valuable property is at stake, or when the recipient of services is highly vulnerable to financial loss from fraud, the government has some business licensing who can do what.

But now along comes the Direct Marketing Association (DMA for short). No, they're not a government organization. They’re a private trade organization, and what they want to do is license junk mail writers who write for and have their work reviewed by the sophisticated direct marketers and ad agencies that hire them.

A trade association shakedown

The DMA doesn't actually call it licensing. They call it “certification.” But what it boils down to is trying to force a bunch of hungry free lance writers in effect bribe that noble organization, The Direct Marketing Association, with fees for courses in exchanging for plying their ink stained trade. In effect, it's a shakedown.

The awful news came out in the October issue of Inside Direct Mail, a junk mail business trade paper that unfortunately you cannot access on the Internet unless you pay money or happen to subscribe to the magazine. I get the magazine because (full disclosure) I earn part of my daily bread writing junk mail. I’ve won awards for it, some of them given out by the DMA itself, for the quality and effectiveness of my work. I’ve got a 25 years of experience in the business.

But no matter, if the DMA has its way. I cannot be a member of “an elite group of professionals,” unless I now pay the DMA each year to participate in the DMA’s “Certified Marketing Professional Program.”

This includes written tests and annual follow-up courses. This, among other things, is going to teach me the difference between writing for print, the web and twitter. Wow! As if I’d never written for (or heard of) any of them.

Sounds to me like it’s just a money-grabbing scheme for the DMA, which recently has been so financially hard up that it fired just short of 20 percent of its loyal staff, some of whom had been working there for years.

Evasive answers in techno-jargon

You can tell it’s all techno-baloney by the evasive answers and run-on technobabble used by Jodie Sangster, the DMA’s “Vice president of global compliance.” Whatever the hell that title means. (That’s her in the photograph.)

For example, from a column in Inside Direct mail called (ironically in this case) “Straight Talk,” comes this enlightening information:

Q:What can a direct mail copywriter, for example, learn from such a program?

Sangster: DMA’s vision is one of increasing the intelligence in all networks, as a way to strengthen every channel…[elipses are the magazine’s]…and improve the ability of marketers to integrate any and all in a one-on-one conversation with a customer.

She goes on from there, but I suspect that, like me, you’d prefer a more merciful means of getting put to sleep — perhaps by getting whacked over the head with a two-by-for.

Well, okay, nonsense can be charming, so here are one or two more jargon-filled sentences (some might use a stronger word, such as bullshit) from the Global Compliance ubersturmfuhrer:

We believe today’s multichannel direct marketing process lies close to the heart of the information-based economy we have developed in the U.S. As we leverage the DMA platform across a global market, many will capitalize on the knowledge and experience we have accumulated….”

Zzzzzzzzzz!

Can you imagine trying to plow your way through two-pages of nonsense from this genius of prose exposition, who wants the right to grant certification to others to write a sales letter?

But wait, there’s more!

Now it looks as if the Federal Trade Commission wants take the first step toward licensing journalists. They don’t call it that any more than the DMA calls is that when they want you to pay them money for a course before you can write a line on an envelope and a sales letter.

But the FTC has set up a double standard for disclosure — one for bloggers, the other for journalists who write for what’s left of the print press and TV news. And this double standard has teeth that could bleed you dry: teeth like $11,000 fines.

The principle of the First Amendment was that anybody could print anything, so long as it wasn’t libelous or likely to cause a fire or a panic in a crowded theater. But never mind that.

Licensing has always had two purposes. The first is control of others. The second is to generate revenue for the licensor.

That kind of control — and maybe some fees to do some policing — makes sense when it comes to cutting open peoples’ heads and stomachs for medical purposes. It makes no sense at all when it comes to cutting people in our out of the right to report on facts, express opinions or make a living as a writer.

“I’m calling to offer you a green way to pay your bills. And also, this is a stickup."

Here's another collection of tales about why business “self regulation” is the rough equivalent of no regulation at all.

This one has to do with your own privacy, the dangers of identity theft, phony appeals by banks to reduce your carbon footprint, and an ominous blackmail attempt now under FBI investigation.

"We can regulate ourselves —
without no stinkin' government"

Let’s start with the “self-regulation” bit. Most companies, trade associations, and true believers in unfettered enterprise will tell you that government regulation is bad and that industry can better control abuses of your privacy by itself.

Such was the case championed by the Direct Marketing Association — a group that supports those wonderful folks who bring you junk mail, SPAM, and intrusive phone calls at dinnertime.

At issue was all the people who prefer not to be disturbed by telephone marketers peddling subprime mortgages and other wonders of modern civilization.

The law says that once you move and your telephone number changes, your old number can be taken off the “Do Not Call” list. Or at least it can be taken off until a new victim has his dinner ruined once too often by telemarketers trying to reach through the telephone and grab his wallet.

The Direct Marketing Association
complains—and gets it all wrong

According to a story put out by DIRECT Magazine, one of the leading publications of the direct marketing business

…the DMA [Direct Marketing Association] had argued that disconnected names should be removed more quickly from the Registry.

At the FTC’s behest, the DMA submitted a sample list of 20,000 Registry numbers that had been disconnected or reassigned based on whether their names had changed and found that “16% would have been scrubbed in error.”

Based on these results, the DMA’s contractor refined its scrubbing process and reanalyzed the 20,000 numbers. It determined that 8,374 should be treated as active registrations, the FTC continued.

For the arithmetically challenged, that means that more than 40% of those do-not-calls were still valid, not 16% as the DMA claimed.

But wait! There’s more!
And it isn’t good news.

The don’t-regulate-me crowd at the DMA also had urged that “only the line subscriber or person who is billed for the telephone line be allowed to register that number in the National Registry.” In other words, they didn't want you to be able to phone in and put your aged and disabled mother on the registry list. Screw her! Let her opt out on her own. If she needs help, tough luck. And furthermore...

“Critics [representing telephone marketers] were also worried that consumers could be registered without their consent. In response, the FTC now requires that consumers “call from the number they want to register or provide a verification e-mail address if registering online.”

“In addition, the FTC limited the number of registrations that can be made from a single e-mail address.”

See, what the annoying phone call folks are doing is protecting you against having your name "unfairly removed" from the Do Not Call list. Why? I guess they assume that if you haven’t gone out of your way to opt out, or haven't heard that you can, you really, really want those phone calls at dinnertime. So they've been "protecting" you so you'll keep getting called.

Go green and make
your banker richer

Then there’s the so called “PayItGreen Alliance,” a group of financial institutions that not only has trouble putting spaces between words but also, according to The Big Fat Marketing Blog “trumpet the money saving benefits of paperless transactions for bill paying and other purposes.”

The blog, which is written by Larry Riggs, a Direct Magazine staffer, comments:

Wait a second. Are we being treated to another massive con job from the financial industry? 

In fact, banks and others have been blowing this trumpet for at least 20 years.

 While it‘s fashionable able now to say you care for the environment, we must remember that it costs banks and credit card companies a hell of a lot less to send and receive bills electronically.

 So who’s really saving the big bucks?

 Of course, not using paper leaves consumers susceptible to privacy invasion and data breaches. Hardly a day goes by now without reports of data theft from banks, hospitals or retailers.

Company gets blackmailed
—with your information

As if to drive the point home, on the same day that Direct Magazine revealed a slight, umm, error in DMA thinking about Do Not Call Lists, the very same day it published Riggs’ comments above, the magazine also broke news of an investigation into a terrifying blackmail scheme involving identity theft.

A large manager of prescription benefits has charged that extortionists have threatened to disclose medical information on its customers if the company fails to meet payment demands, the Washington Post reported.

Express Scripts said it had received a letter in October that listed the names, birth dates and Social Security numbers on 75 of its customers. In some cases, prescription data was included, the Post continued.

The letter stated that millions of such records would be released if the company failed to pay, the article said.

Express Scripts processes prescription claims… handling 500 million prescriptions year for roughly 50 million Americans, the Post stated.

One of the problems with giving personal data such as your Security Number, health information and other personal data to private corporations is that the info seems somehow to "walk" out of the office more often than is comfortable. And sometimes it falls into the hands of very bad guys. Blackmailers, for example.

“We can handle it with self-regulation,” private industry and doctrinaire Ayn Randist free marketers insist.

Except, of course, when they can’t. Which occurs more and more often, putting you, your privacy and your identity at risk.