New MPS is it a move in the right direction?

Nov. 1, 2011 - PRLog -- The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) are launching a new website in April which will allow consumers to opt-out of receiving all types of unwanted advertising mail.

Currently households have to register with at least three different services – the Mailing Preference Service, the Your Choice Preference System and Royal Mail's Door to Door opt-out service – to stop the different types of unwanted mail from being delivered.

The government has signed a three-year deal with the DMA with the intention of reducing the waste from direct mail to zero. Defra said that by 2014 the amount of unwanted direct will fall significantly as a result of the marketing industry increasing its current use of "suppression lists" (which includes opt-out, do not contact and gone-away lists visit: http://www.data-8.co.uk/goneaway_suppression.aspx) by 25%.

However this does raise a number of issues for Richard Hartland, technical director data8 who said, “Although Defra and the DMA have announced a new version of the MPS, there has been no accompanying change in legislation regarding the MPS. The assumption seems to have been made by the DMA that the MPS is currently law (although this view remains legally unchallenged)”.

Hartland continued, “In the absence of a permission statement explicitly giving permission to mail any individual, it is certainly always best practise to MPS data visit http://www.data-8.co.uk/mps_suppression.aspx. If you are members of the DMA (and again subject to opted-in permission) then it is a required feature of DMA membership to MPS your mailing lists”.

Data8, as members of the DMA, are obliged to recommend that clients always MPS cleanse their data where there is no opted-in permission.

Data8’s view is that if clients have good opted-in permission at the point of data capture then no legislation change is likely to affect their rights to contact their customers. However, if these permissions are not in place, or clients would find it difficult to prove how and when they collected the permissions, then it is best advice to MPS screen the database before mailing.

More information can be found about the legal status of MPS in the following blog article that data8 published last year.

http://www.data-8.co.uk/blog/post/2010/09/21/Use-of-MPS-n...

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