New opt-in data service claims to be end of ‘junk’

A new data service claims it will change the way direct marketers communicate with consumers by allowing them to choose which brands can use their data and when.

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The free service, called Allow, claims to “spell the beginning of the end for junk marketing”, while improving the efficiency of DM campaigns by limiting the data to potentially more responsive prospects.

The startup – a joint venture between Justin Basini, the former head of marketing and customer initiative management at Capital One, and marketing solutions veteran Howard Huntley – will remove customers from the top 12 marketing databases and register them with opt-out services such as the Mail Preference Service (MPS) and Email Preference Service.

Allow will then sell a customer’s data back to companies once they have chosen which companies they want to receive mail from and when. Profit will be split between the customer and Allow.

Basini claims that the data industry is “inefficient and wasteful”, with direct marketing “essentially expensive guesswork with poor response rates”.

“It became clear to us that something needed to change in the way that marketers communicate with their customers, giving more control to the individual. This would be much more efficient for both the people and the companies,” says Basini.

Opt-out services such as the MPS, which is funded by the direct mail industry, enable consumers to have their names and home addresses removed from contacts lists.

The Anti-Marketing Group charges customers in return for stopping “99.9% of nuisance marketing straight away”.