Malcolm: Have you ever heard of Amorphous New Media? No, neither have I. Let's meet Grant Shippey who is going to talk to us about that. Grant, we particularly want to talk about the Direct Marketing Association and the e-business committee guidelines for doing business online. It's long overdue I would imagine.

Grant: Absolutely. I think we've been running in the Wild West here for a long time and thankfully actually haven't had prescriptive legislation at all, even though there is a green paper in the forums at the moment. So we got together as part of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and I suppose typically people think we're more about telephone costs and how much it costs to send 1000 people some junk mail and so on.

Malcolm: Yes.

Grant: And obviously the Internet is a major part of the direct marketing industry and we went to industry and formed a committee to actually tackle drafting some guidelines as one of our objectives. This is our first draft that we're promulgating this week. We will obviously now go to industry and interested parties for comment.

Malcolm: Who does the DMA really work for? Does it work for it's members or does it work for the general public at large?

Grant: It works for both. It does have a subscription base of members, being typically any direct marketers from the ad agencies to the companies themselves. I believe the membership base is around 4000 organisations. Then obviously through that they do represent the consumer and obviously lobby government where appropriate.

Malcolm: Give me some for instances of what direct marketing is because again, I think a few people might be confused about it.

Grant: Say you are an airline loyalty programme member and you receive a brochure that says "take up this offer and you'll get extra points". That is direct marketing because you're going directly from the organisation to the consumer. Or a tele-marketer phones you and says "hi, we've got an awesome special on insurance today - can I underwrite you and your wife for x premium?".

Malcolm: Okay, and then you'll get a fax out of the blue as well. How does that work?

Grant: Well I think they'd use any transmission where there is direct contact with the consumer because then they are in the direct marketing space and hence obviously, the very deliberate inclusion of Internet, email, SMS and all of these things into that space.

Malcolm: Well that leads us to the next question - what is the difference between direct mail and spam? In as far as emails are concerned, we get unsolicited emails as it is. What is your role on that?

Grant: What we are actually recommending on the email side is that solicitation and permission is obviously crucial. I can't talk too much for my colleagues in the traditional space but obviously in the electronic space it is a very real issue and the DMA takes that very, very seriously. So we are actually recommending the strongest guidelines in terms of non-default opt in. You've got to have that real deliberate decision to be part of that and you actually have a secondary decision that says can I share my information, can I rent out that information, lease it or sale it.

Malcolm: Well the Americans do this, don't they? If you subscribe to a program like the Symantec anti-virus, as a case in point, they will ask you for a whole pile of details but you also have the option to say no, I don't want you to send me this stuff or any further updates. So you can opt out and remain a hermit if you want to. Is that the line that you're moving on as well?

Grant: Absolutely. I think the line has been drawn in the sand for quite some time as an industry standard but nobody has actually published a guideline in the South African web space around that. There was no obligation on any site to actually ask those questions or protect privacy or not to share the list and so on. So we're just trying to get together as a body and as an industry to say, hey, lets regulate ourselves and let's do the right thing.

Malcolm: What do you do about the ones that don't provide the box at the bottom where you can unsubscribe?

Grant: We're setting up a complaints facility where you can actually go up to the DMA site and actually complain about the people who are spamming you.

Malcolm: Well of course it's the porn merchants who are the worst and they come from all over the world.