It's a difficult conflict of interest for the Government.  Legislators need to tread a path which allows them to foster British business and triumph freedom of information and civil liberties, whilst protecting the nation's children from dangerous influences (like marketers and scenes of intercourse).

There's no doubt imposing restrictions on the rights of children to access explicit material is a control on freedom of media, which incidentally is principally no worse than the legislation which rules suicide illegal - because a spell in prison can really make life worth living these days.

But in your prison cell you'd need a pin code to view adult material on your Sky-enabled, state sponsored television.

Access to internet pornography has been debated for years but the recently completed independent parliamentary inquiry into online child protection has brought the relevant parties downstairs to the debating table.

At stake: a proposal to make ISPs filter content available for children, just as publishers cover top-shelf magazines and TV companies pin-enable adult channels.  Thusfar, TalkTalk is the only ISP to introduce a product to address this, it's called HomeSafe.  But campaigners want more, they want the UK to pioneer new legislation on the same scale as the 2007 landmark agreement to block access to child abuse imagery.

But Government and its supporters, who include information-for-all champion Google, aren't keen.  This may have something to do with the enormous commercial value of the pornography industry and the subsidary retailers it supports; not to mention the very vocal civil liberties contingent who seem to think threatening internet content rides alongside allowing cyclists to use the public highway without helmets, because certain death is a right provided it wasn't premeditated, of course and hey, it's tax free.

When it comes to internet pornography, it's a great deal easier to blame the parents - those allegedly in charge of The Big Society.

Sadly, blaming the parents won't save the direct mail industry.  It seems marketers, their clients and the countless jobs their sector supports from creative agencies, to data analsyts and even the humble postman are all a greater threat with their brand of explicit content.

Ultimately the nation's lawmakers have to decide which is more offensive: a young child viewing hardcore pornography or a homeowner receiving a direct mail piece offering breakdown cover.

"Not all data companies are created equal! Lloyd James are a DMA Dataseal accredited company. If you deal with data providers ensure they are too”

Lloyd James - CEO

It seems that people are re-discovering the importance of writing to each other and sending simple thank you cards.  I love it!  Last week I was looking through some old paperbacks and decided that rather than simply pile them on my bookshelves I would send them to my sister, she has just started to get into reading again decades after being told by her teachers that it is good for the soul.  I purchased my Royal Mail postage box for just a couple of pounds and loaded in eight books.  With the space still left in the box I included a couple of other items that were lurking in a drawer that I thought she could use.  The joy and delight on receiving the box was incredible.  A simple act, a simple thought, encouraged by an old Royal Mail advertising slogan 'I saw this and thought of you'.  It simply made her day.
 
In these times when we are told that Royal Mail is losing millions and will have to shave thousands of jobs, why don't they re-think their service and bring back the early morning post?  There are generations of us who were used to receiving our mail before leaving to go to work in the morning. Now, we are lucky if the post is delivered before lunchtime.  Most of us don’t get to see the post until the end of the day when the last thing we feel is positive about the potential contents of the mail box.  Maybe if they went back to early morning post they might see an increase in Direct Mail, which does actually still work, even though internet gurus will tell you it doesn't.  I still believe that the decline in Direct Mail interest is in part due to late mail delivery.  You see to get a relevant message into the hands of the consumer at a time when they feel fresh and awake can make a huge difference to the advertiser.
 
There have been many successful comebacks - Take That, Salad Cream, Spandau Ballet, who would have thought it?  So, Royal Mail, stop whinging about losses, people are crying out that they love the post so do something about it ... come back!

Lloyd James - CEO

This week saw the collapse of Greek debt bonds with yields rising to above 11% as the investments were effectively labelled as "junk" by credit rating agencies. Since the Greek credit rating downgraded we have seen a reduction in the credit rating for Spanish and Portuguese national debt with more downgrades likely in the short to medium term. Whether or not the UK credit rating will come under pressure in the short term remains to be seen but there are growing worries across Europe.

Rogoff, who has just published a book on eight centuries of financial crises, said that Greece was "a serial defaulter".  Since the modern Greek state was founded in 1830, the country has, on average, been in sovereign default every other year and had been through five big defaults in less than 200 years. "Greece has been worse than any Latin American country," he adds.
Perhaps the economists should learn a lesson from direct marketers.  I’m sure that if the team of analysts here at Lloyd James were building a risk score model for a client they would most certainly have picked up on such a major factor that, after all, has been an issue over the last 200 years!  Our advice would have been that they should have been regarded as far too high a risk to offer any type of credit product and to move them swiftly onto the DNC list!

Darrel Linehan

Lloyd James - CEO

Entrepreneurial Brain-wave or Marketing Catastrophe?

With 360 million Hotmail users, the benefits are clear for all to see - for consumers they can interact with a company without having to wait for the browser to open a new window, for marketers it should mean high response rates and cuts out the issues of invalid links being broadcast.

As shown in the video, the creative can include text fields, drop down boxes and more, which could work well for companies such as those in the travel sector for accommodation searches and campaigns which need to provide real time information - such as online ticket companies to show ticket availability.

One industry blogger has said that it will be used by retailers to check whether an item is still in stock. I'm not convinced retailers will be too keen about this, it could mean that consumers would not visit their site and could lose them an opportunity to sell a different/alternative product.

Whilst I applaud the new technology being introduced, it does come with some issues. You only need to look on the You Tube video to see that some consumers are not welcoming the technology with open arms - concerned about receiving more spam/unlawful emails and also the risk of their security (both in terms of personal information and the risk associated with running Java scripts). Hotmail users are also angry at the timing of the launch at a time when thousands of users lost historical emails at the turn of the year.

In the past, we have been told not to include text boxes or embed videos in HTML creatives because of the issues regarding deliverability so it will be interesting to see if there are any issues with deliverability when using Active Views.

The use of email as a marketing tool is constantly changing and updating and will need to address current challenges and develop new innovations such as this to continue to provide an effective channel.

Personally, I think this will be an innovative solution that in the future will be as common as HTML emails are now ... once the teething problems are ironed out and consumers buy into the benefits. I don't envisage the solution alone increasing response rates to massive proportions but it will prove to be another weapon in the marketers' fight against declining response rates.

What do YOU think about this?

Paul Jempson, Direct Marketing Consultant

For many, data protection is a grey area.  The latest iteration, released in 1998, outlines in eight relatively clear points how data should be handled and transmitted.  It is interesting to consider that despite many companies failing to comply, it has taken twelve years for an organisation to be financially penalised by the ICO for breaching the rules.

It is reassuring to know the mistakes made by Hertfordshire County Council were taken seriously:  the council is to be fined £100,000 for faxing details of a child sex abuse case to the wrong recipient on two cocasions.  However, the lack of penalties until now is suspicious.  Where companies themselves are having difficulty interpreting the requirements of the Act, the authorities are apparently having equal difficulty investigating suspected breaches.  This points to a potentially serious problem: as the lastest WikiLeaks release is continuing to spectacularly demonstrate, mismanaged data can have very serious consequences. 

The detail of the Act itself is easily overlooked.  In Hertfordshire's case the relatively outdated transmission method of faxing was involved, which produces useful hard evidence at the moment of contravention.  Email, however, is an entirely different area.  Many businesses are unaware that simply forwarding a message from one person to another can breach the Act as crucial data from the original message is carried forward to the final destination in possible breach of data transmission regulation.

With billions of such transmissions every year and an ever growing pool of data being kept on each one of us, responsible handling of information has never been more important.  The Information Commission is hoping these inaugural fines for breaching data protection law will send a strong message to organisations handling data; if these cases, in addition to government blunders and WikiLeaks, can't stem the tide of mistakes the legislation itself may have to be reviewed.

If you'd like to tell us what you think of the CTPS please leave your comments here.

Currently individuals do not profit from the sale of their personal data, but can we see a future where they could?  Potentially not only could they profit but they could also have some management and control over who they sign up with and what they sign up for.

This leads me to wondering whether there is a gap for a “self-management” list broker where individuals can sign up with their details/preferences and receive email notifications for upcoming campaigns they may like to opt in to/out of.   The individuals would personally receive part of the rental revenue so the more they sign up for the more they earn.

This could promote DM on the whole as sales literature would have a value to the person receiving it.  Currently, social media sites such as Facebook are ideally placed to implement such a system, as they hold a wealth of personal data but perhaps the gap is currently there for a list broking company to implement such a system before Facebook get chance!  Maybe such a system could be developed in tandem with Facebook, or alternatively a 3rd party application which runs over Facebook.

Imagine the advertisement for the Facebook app where you can “earn money as you use Facebook”.  Surely this would be a win-win situation, as we all get to access a contactable list of people who have actively opted-in to a campaign, and the individuals are happy to receive DM literature as they have a vested interest in receiving it. 

Food for thought indeed!
 
Christian Worseley - Database Architect

We partnered up a major UK hotel brand with Classic FM.  Classic FM send out a monthly CRM newsletter which carries a solus advertiser offer.  The hotel chain offered a competition to win an overnight stay in one of their flagship hotels.  The response was phenomenal – the open rate was 80% and 25% of people who opened clicked through to the hotel website and entered the competition with over 25% of competition entrants opting in to receiving future email promotions from the hotel brand.

Just a week later we sent a consumer home lifestyle magazine offer to the Estate Angels database of pre-movers and again the results were phenomenal.  The open rate was lower at 23%, however a massive 81% of people who opened clicked through to the publisher’s website.  Estate Angels are part of the Angels Media Group.

So what did these two campaigns have in common and what was it that determined their success?  Firstly, both were perfectly targeted and both advertisers tailored the creative and the offer to suit the audience – this willingness to create offers specific to the audience always pays dividends.  The offers related to the carrier brand perfectly and both creatives went out in the list owners’ templates so recipients could see they came from a trusted and welcome source.  Finally, and of utmost importance, both carrier brands strictly limit the number of communications their readers receive and this is the key ... data fatigue affects results nowhere more so than in the field of email marketing and consumers quickly switch off from brands that constantly send badly targeted offers to their inbox.

Big thanks go out from us to Classic FM and Estate Angels for providing us with great vehicles for successful campaigns.  We’re proud to be representing these brands and look forward to many similar results in the future.