It's time for marketers to move aggressively on the self-regulation front, according to H. Robert Wientzen, outgoing president of the Direct Marketing Association.

He pulled no punches in a keynote address at the DMA's Net.marketing conference in New York last month, urging DMers to follow ethical guidelines to the letter, listen to consumers and help eliminate industry-threatening practices by less reputable firms.

Marketers need to be “transparent” with information-usage methods and call for disclosure of information sharing by compilers, he said. Wientzen believes this could help head off additional regulatory efforts. “Policymakers seem more inclined to take action in the ‘privacy’ arena…[they] know they're on to something that the public and press are very receptive to.”

Learn from the past, he said, noting the experiences of sweepstakes marketers and outbound telemarketers. DMers failed themselves and their industry and now must carry the burden of regulation, he said, because they did not heed complaints.

“If you were sending a sweepstakes mailing that said, ‘You are a winner!,’ then the recipient should have been a winner,” Wientzen said. And why didn't telemarketers voluntarily make their practices more consumer-friendly?

For DMers marketing online, Wientzen continued, now is the time to act. “Today's consumer is — thanks largely to the Web — more informed and more in control. And yet I don't really think enough marketers act like that's the case.”

Consumer protection policies should be ingrained in DMers' corporate cultures, Wientzen said, not just posted in legalese somewhere on their site.

Can Spam was necessary, and although it might not reduce spam, it does pre-empt the “hodgepodge” of 36 state laws, he said.

To further help the industry regulate itself, the DMA recently approved guidelines for appending e-mail addresses to consumer records. These guidelines must be followed as a condition of membership in the association.

Under the rules, a marketer should not append or add a consumer's e-mail address to its database unless the consumer gives the marketer permission to do so.

There are three other conditions under which it would also be permissible to append an e-mail. One is if a firm has an established business relationship with the consumer either online or offline.

Another acceptable condition is if the data used in the append process came from sources that provided notice and choice about receiving third-party e-mail offers, and the consumer did not opt out.

A third is that reasonable efforts must be taken to ensure the appending of accurate e-mail addresses to the corresponding consumer records.

Under the guidelines, marketers are not allowed to sell, rent, transfer or exchange an appended e-mail unless the consumer is given notice and choice about the action the marketer plans to take. All messages to an e-mail appended address should include notice and choice.