The CEO of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) of South Africa, Brian Mdluli, wrote an extraordinary “open letter” to a member of the industry. Not only is such a public spat unseemly, but the basis for the complaints against BulkSMS CEO Pieter Streicher seem thin, at best.
The naivet'e is staggering.
Ivo Vegter, ITWeb contributor
Streicher appears simply to raise an important point, namely that the law shouldn't require opt-out from unsolicited marketing message, but should require opt-in. This is a perfectly reasonable position, and one that has been made ever since the Electronic Communications and Transaction Act first failed to deal with spam appropriately, a decade ago.
Of course, the DMA, representing marketers as it does, would be bitterly opposed to this idea. But why write such a bitter letter, complete with allegations of vested interests on the part of BulkSMS, which Mdluli said tendered for the opt-out registry that is mandated by the Consumer Protection Act? (Streicher denies this is the case.)
If Mdluli is to be to be believed, the DMA is merely an innocent non-profit organisation, trying its best to be nice to consumers, despite a few unfortunate mistakes.
The truth is not only that the DMA has far more obvious vested interests, in that it represents an industry whose entire mission is to contact consumers, rather than maintain lists of who not to contact. A well-placed source - who requested anonymity because of their association with a company that did in fact bid for the CPA opt-out tender - tells me the DMA is about to be awarded the very tender it accuses BulkSMS to be after.
Why an innocent non-profit is so determined to make money from a government contract, that it will publicly attack people it perceives as a competitive threat, is best left as an exercise for the reader.
The news raises far more serious questions. If you recall, the DMA is the very same organisation that thought it would be a good idea to e-mail a spreadsheet of its existing opt-out registry to all its members. Way to go, direct marketers!
In doing so, the DMA had to absolutely trust all of its members to have consumers' best interests at heart, and not to abuse the database. The naivet'e is staggering. Needless to say, the list leaked, and is now a great source of personal information for spammers and identity thieves.
Mdluli is very sorry about that, and hopes everyone will help track down the meanie who leaked it. That'll be cold comfort to the 40 000 suckers who didn't want to be contacted, and trusted the DMA, but instead had their names, identity numbers, phone numbers and e-mail addresses e-mailed to spammers.
Why on earth would the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) wish to reward such gross incompetence with a tender to maintain a database that marketers are obliged, by law, to use?
It doesn't take an IT security genius to figure out that an opt-out registry requires a secure server, which answers “yes” or “no” to queries, without disclosing the data on which this response is based. That the DMA couldn't figure this out the first time around reveals it is entirely unqualified to fulfil an important statutory obligation. Even a first-year computer science student would expect to fail for making such a basic error. It isn't something that could happen to anyone. Claims of good intentions won't save the DMA's tarnished reputation.
Before this saga gets any uglier, let's hope the DTI understands that the protection of privacy afforded by the Consumer Protection Act will be completely undermined if the tender is awarded to the biased, incompetent, and oh-so-touchy souls at the DMA.
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