North East Surrey Crematorium article feedback

The Wimbledon Guardian's article about the North East Surrey Crematorium and my conviction that they have not only broken the bounds of taste, but also the Data Protection Act 1998, has drawn mixed reactions. The interesting thing is the first reaction, from one Val Newman, a person who has had many dealings with the crematorium. Val misses the point of legality and does not understand how the Data Protection Act applies.

At first sight that is fine, but is it?

If the ordinary British public do not understand the law and how it is not observed by organisations which abuse their personal data, then what hope to those organisations, who employ the ordinary British public, have of implementing it correctly?

This law was implemented almost eight years ago. For it to be misunderstood still is an indictment of more than one Information Commissioner, whose primary role after regulation is education.

I have no argument with Val about the impeccable behaviour of the crematorium staff, though. You see I met precisely none of them at the funeral, so can't argue. The whole event was handled my my main contractor - the undertaker. It was only after the funeral that I fell victim to unpermissioned marketing and two somewhat high handed people on the telephone.

Update: The complaint has been rejected

North East Surrey Crematorium - Woeful complaints process

Not that anyone cares by now. I have almost lost the will to live myself. I shall not be using this crematorium, though, when I die!

This has been going on since 5 November. If you follow the trail you'll see! This outfit was tacky enough to send me a marketing letter the instant they cremated my mother. And, when I checked, I made a complaint to the UK Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) because I do not believe that they had the right to market to me at all.

So we started the complaints process. On Thursday there was a panel hearing. On Friday I had heard nothing. Today I got this:

Purely to update you, the Board's Complaint Panel met at Civic Offices Sutton on Thursday 24th January to consider and reach a decision on your complaint. A formal report of that decision is now being prepared and this will be forwarded to you as soon as it has been approved by all three panel members and signed off. I would expect you to receive this over the course of the next two weeks.

This was obviously prompted by my snarlogram to the Clerk to the Board complaining that he was impolite because he had not communicated with me in a timely manner. People with complaints do not feel better towards you the longer you take. Waiting for Hell to freeze over is very aggravating.

This process is far, far too long. It should have been dealt with then and there. The longer it goes on the more distressing it is and the angrier I become.

Customer service is completely out of the window here. I was tempted to say that it had gone up in smoke, but somehow that seemed tacky.

Update: Wimbledon Guardian Article attracts comment

North East Surrey Crematorium

If you read Scéance is the New Marketing Medium, It Seems, You'll know that back in November I was very much distressed by the actions of North East Surrey Crematorium when they sent unsolicited marketing material to me postmarked on the day of my mother's funeral.

Yesterday they held the complaint hearing. So that was a complaint on 5th November, and the hearing on 24th January. Yup, that's timely. I haven't heard the outcome yet. However the story was picked up by the Wimbledon Guardian:

A consultant in data privacy has slammed a crematorium for its "tasteless" posting of marketing material, claiming that it broke the law.

Tim Trent, 55, cremated his mum Connie at North East Surrey Crematorium last November and thought that would be the end of the matter.

But three days later, he was stunned to find a glossy brochure on his doormat, advertising memorials, plaques, flowers and other services offered by the crematorium.

Mr Trent said: "It hit me in the face like a sledgehammer. We had a really good send-off for my mother, and thought that chapter of our life was closed. I didn't expect this at all, so it was gloriously distasteful."

The full article is on the Wimbledon Guardian website.

I imagine the UKIC will want to hear the outcome of the crematorium's own complaints hearing before finishing its own considerations.

The Data Protection Act allows and encourages civil claims for damages because of distress. I am pursuing damages proportionate to the distress caused.

Update: An interim holding reply

Bairstow Eves, you do not have my permission

To set this in perspective, I am the executor of my mother's estate and I am selling her house in Worcester Park, in Surrey. It has a notice on the front door. It says 'No newspapers, No leaflets'. That is pretty specific.

Every so often I check on the house. Today I found a hand delivered 'letter' from Bairstow Eves, the estate agent, signed by Matthew Aboud, their local Marketing Manager.

That is a leaflet.

So, leafleting me when specifically prohibited from doing so has lost Bairstow Eves the chance, should my current agent be unsuccessful, of marketing the property. And their 'letter' was one asking if they could do so.

I called Matthew and explained this to him. I imagine he cared a little. I very much doubt he understands what Permission Based Marketing is. I mentioned that he had won a place on this blog.

Oh, if I'd wanted them to act as my agent, I would have asked them to bid for my business. My current agent, Samuel James, is precisely what I want to market the property. I chose them with care.

Sainsbury's is still chickened out

There has been a medium term follow through from the TV shows telling us about chicken rearing. The shelves, at least at my local and large Sainsbury's store in Bracknell are still full of broiler house birds, but there isn't a free range bird to be seen.

I checked with the Customer Service desk. They have had a few in, but these birds can fly. They go out as fast as the shelves get stocked. They hope to be getting a few more in tomorrow morning.

Should we take this at face value, or should we be cynical?

European Data Protecion Law is inadequate

This is the view of Peter Hustin, the European Data Protection Supervisor. It's part of his reaction to pan-galactic databases allegedly to help prevent terrorism. The "those with nothing to hide have nothing to fear" databases.

Why I am reminded of the Holocaust every time I see that phrase? "Yup, being Jewish yesterday was fine, but today it's an arrestable offence." After all we get new crimes every day. It was not that long ago that the offence of "Speaking Arabic and trying to ride on the London Eye" was created, and then there is the capital offence of "Trying to travel on the London Underground while wearing a bulky jacket."

Hustin is right. The current legal framework is wholly inadequate. Have a look at the article synopses on ComplianceAndPrivacy and maybe tell me what you think.

Is your landing page fit for purpose?

Rather like Mae West said, but not exactly as she said, "So many prospects, so little time!"

If your campaign is directed at a landing page, and it should be, let's have some basics that you need to make sure your campaign works properly. You're expending effort and budget in making a campaign drive people to you in order to buy your product or service. The very least you can do is get your end right! It's only polite. And it's your brand values that you're wasting when you get it wrong.

One: Does it have a Fair Processing Notice?
A landing page doesn't need a privacy policy. It needs a Fair Processing Notice - a statement of what will happen to the data once entered - that is clear, easy to read, above the submit button and detailed enough to be fair

Two: Does it make it clear who the Data Controller is?
It needs to state it, explicitly. Most landing pages are on separate domains from main websites. The subscriber needs to know who controls the data.

Three: Does it make it clear where the data is processed?
The EEA has laws which prohibit the expert of personal data without informed consent. Where is your data stored? Storage is processing.

Four: Does it work?
Not just "did it work when we designed the campaign." Does it work today, now? Benecol just ran a UK campaign where their B2C landing page was not working. It didn't just fail, there was no route for the kind subscriber to tel them so.

Five: Is there a fallback plan?
If the landing page fails, what should your subscribers do? I don't mean that you must have a fallback plan, I mean you must have decided whether you need one. Benecol did. It worked. But it was relatively expensive for them in terms of inbound call costs.

Six: Do you collect too much data?
Why oh why are you collecting Date of Birth. Back to Benecol. Why do they need my birthday in order to send me margarine vouchers? They can have the year with pleasure. But why the month and why the day? If you need data like this, say why, in plain sight, and make sure your subscribers understand the need.

Aim to collect no more than five pieces of data. Any more than that you can collect next time you contact them. Any more than that and they abandon your landing page.

Seven: Do you acknowledge and thank them for their subscription?
Obvious, huh?

Well, no, not so obvious. For fun go and register on a few landing pages. See who says "thank you" in some tangible manner.

Eight: Have you tested every link, every phone number?
Anyone can proofread a page. Have you tested it? A few years ago a colleague created a glorious campaign, in those days for inbound telesales. The campaign went out and the phone did not ring. Belatedly, and inspirationally, he dialled the number on his campaign literature. The phone rang, but not in his call centre.

After a while it was answered by a perplexed voice.

You're thinking "Poor Mrs Higgins, he got her home number by mistake," aren't you?

The number was in a secret military command and control establishment, a direct line to a presser of difficult buttons who was about to move in to a new office. The line was currently unused, and they had just plugged the phone in that day. They were wondering why it was ringing off the hook!

He has always insisted on dialling every number, checking every url, emailing every email address since that day.

Make sure your landing page works, esp if B2C

I've just followed up on a Benecol campaign. They offer free vouchers if you visit their UK website. The stuff's expensive, so the vouchers are probably worthwhile. My doctor says I need it because it reduces cholesterol, but it costs a fortune.

Anyway, I filled out all my data, and ended up at an error page. That was at 7:30am. Now, at 10:22 it is still an error page. Plenty of time to learn about it and put it right.

I called the phone number, since it was a free number. That cost Benecol at least £10. Now that number is obviously an outsourced call centre, but I asked if they knew that the website was dead.

"Yes, we're getting told this a lot."

"Do you have a feedback mechanism to tell Benecol this?"

"No."

This is plain daft. The campaign is faulty and it just has not been put right. But the call centre has no route to tell them that it's faulty!

Supermarkets are chicken

To be fair, not all are. Sainsbury's, Waitrose and the Co-op all came out well from 'Jamie's Fowl Dinners', compiled and presented by Jamie Oliver. Both of my non UK readers will wonder what I'm talking about. So, for you, a synopsis of the TV show was to follow chicken egg and chicken meat production from egg to table, comparing the methods of rearing, letting the audience judge which was appropriate for their budget and emotional needs.

Previous programmes in the week showed Hugh fearnley-Whittingstall running what had to be anathema to him - a factory chicken farm. Together they made gripping, if somewhat horrifying television.

Since I work from home very often, the weekly shopping often falls on my shoulders. I cook, too, and I've been cooking and eating budget chicken for years. On Thursday, even before Jamie's Fowl Dinners, Sainsbury's were completely out of free range chickens, but the shelves of value chickens, the dirt cheap stuff I have been in the habit of buying, were full. People were just not putting them into their trolleys. And people were discussing it with other total strangers while looking at the shelves.

On the Friday show, Sainsbury's showed total progress towards free range, as did Waitrose, and the Co-op. And Hellmans the mayonnaise giant, stated an end date to caged eggs being used as an ingredient. ASDA showed a lack of understanding of the power of television, amusing and ironic with their huge TV campaigns, and Tesco showed that it intended to keep on taking £1 in every £8 spent in the UK high street no matter what.

But the thing, the real thing, was the emptiness of the Sainsbury's shelves. This was not advertising. This was my local Bracknell British public voting with its wallet. If we can afford it we will pay more for animal welfare in our food chain. We said so on Thursday.

And this was caused by simple, accurate documentary television that was distasteful to watch - TV that caused more people to hide behind the sofa than Dr Who's monsters. Daleks are pussycats compared with a good and ethical stockman culling useless birds in your living room.

The thing that annoys me about this, insofar as one can be annoyed by anything leading to better animal husbandry, is that the losers will always be the farmers.

Farmers respond to markets. Today's market is the supermarket buying team. That team has driven the produced price of a food chicken to £0.03 per bird. Three pence. Three. That's not even worth converting into other currencies - it's pathetically small, and has to be below the cost of production, discounting everything else. This price per bird means that the bedding, sold for fertiliser, is more valuable than the meat!

"What do you farm?"

"Oh I produce shit, by the ton. As a by-product we sell chickens to the supermarkets!"

Farmers are, not unreasonably, angry. They have been backed into the corner of investing hugely in unpleasant technology, are mortgaged to the hilt, and are now seeing a week of TV shows threaten their investment and threaten supermarket buying patterns. To re-invest in less intensive methods while the current investment is not recovered is a huge thing to ask them to do. This is one of the reasons why the juggernaut takes so long to turn.

Supermarkets respond to consumers, though. The question is, with the huge power of this week of TV showing how unpleasant the standard and approved production methods are, how will the farmer be able to respond?

More cynically, how high will the supermarkets raise the price of free range poultry to take advantage of the new demand for better conditions in food production?

2008 – Lucky 7 Digital Marketing Predictions

One - SPAM:

People will still be deluged by emails telling us we have inadequate genitalia. While it is very worrying to me that they must have checked(!), the greater concern is the submerging of wanted, permissioned messages in the welter of trash

Two – Greylisting with replace Blocklisting:

I have several ISPs for email. One, at my instruction, because they started spam-blocking an important client, offers me no SPAM protection, most offer simple, allegedly heuristic, blocklisting. My own email server “greylists”.

Greylisting relies on the economics of spamming. A spammer’s email server expects outbound emails to bounce. It ignores all normal email protocol soft bounce messages and it doesn’t retry (0.9 probability). Greylisting simply sends a couple (or more) of soft bounce messages before accepting the inbound mail. Real email retries for several days in case the receiving server is in trouble. More than 90% of spammers seem to give up. SPAM can and does evade Greylisting, but so little gets past that it leaves a very clean inbox.

The downside is that a new, unrecognised “from” server can have email delayed for a few minutes. That’s a small price to pay. Most people only check their inboxes every 30-60 minutes anyway.

Three – More Teeth for Data Privacy Enforcement:

The UK Information Commissioner is asking for more powers, including the power to inspect an organisation with or without permission from the organisation. In 2008 he will get those powers. No more Chihuahua – here comes the Rottweiler.

As a marketer I am grateful for the imbecilic UK Government departments who lost 25 million or more data records, precisely because they will empower the UK Commissioner. For far too long he has had to sit idly by and watch people drive a coach and horses through Data Protection legislation without legally being able to stop them. Those of us who have taken the moral high ground and embraced Permission Based Marketing have seen a huge payoff for our clients, but the temptation to act like a cowboy is still great.

But, from 2008 onwards, the days of the cowboy marketer are numbered.

Four – Your Marketing Database will Shrink:

That’s awful, isn’t it? How can we possibly press the “more button” with a smaller database?

But, as the UK Information Commissioner gets more power the true cost of massive databases with obsolete data starts to come to the surface. You will look at the cost of keeping data up to date and weep. Remember, every email to old data exposes you to the risk of more and more complaints. And here comes the Rottweiler. How thick is the seat of your trousers? How many bites can it withstand?

You’ll weed out obsolete records and easily halve the size of your database. Now, apart from backfilling with good data, you have the chance to perform small, highly rifle targeted campaigns, perhaps to communities of 100 at a time.

Five – Prospect Intelligence will Increase:

This is directly related to the shrinkage of your marketing database and the rifle targeted campaigns. With your prospective customer’s direct consent you will gather more and more valid, up to date, relevant intelligence about their buying intentions. You will relate to them directly, you will interact with them, and you will walk them along the path of buying from you, not once, but again and again.

This allows the rifle targeting. And it benefits from it, too. Your data will become so valuable that it will be second nature to guard it correctly to prevent misuse. You won’t need to hear the Rottweiler’s heavy pawed approach!

Six – Outsourcing of eCampaigns will increase

SPEWS (the self styled Spam Prevention Early Warning System) died at some point in 2007. SPEWS specialised in blocklisting increasingly wide IP address ranges (the source of alleged SPAM emails) until ISPs started to kick spammers off. Even so, even though the risk of your own outbound email server being blocklisted has reduced, wise digital marketers outsource eCampaigns to specialists who know how to negotiate themselves off blocklists.

Running an eCampaign from your own email server is pure folly. Some years ago, after a false positive was identified at SpamCop as SPAM, a company I was associated with had its entire web site taken down by the ISP. The money and reputation lost was incalculable, the more so since the false positive had come from a fully permission campaign to sell seats at a seminar on Data Protectionwith on-site landing pages. The irony did not escape them!

Seven – Permission Based Marketing will be the Only Game in Town:

The shotgun has a place. But that place is not with digital marketing. Campaigns to permissioned lists will be the only effective way of reaching new and existing prospects. And these include “Refer a Friend” schemes, though these have to be well run and lawful.