We’re into the countdown to July 1 when Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation kicks in with a radically new regime on consent. Marketing editor-in-chief David Thomas caught up with Adam Froman, CEO of Delvinia and AskingCanadians, to discuss whether the marketing industry is ready for it. Part one of this discussion ran June 6. Here’s part two.
Marketing: New legal regimes are great for the legal consulting business. For businesses in the marketing industry that don’t have a team of high-priced in-house legal talent, preparations have been more challenging, especially if they were late to the game in getting prepared. Where do you see marketing firms discovering the obvious landmines and pitfalls?
Froman: We engaged Aird & Berlis and they were able to explain the landmines and pitfalls in a very practical manner that we could understand. From there they provided us with a checklist of what we needed to give them so that they could provide us implemental advice, which allowed us to spend our budget wisely. It is really only a few hours of work for an experienced lawyer to do an audit of your communications assets and practices.
Adam Froman
Companies also need to be concerned about the language they use around obtaining consent. It has to be very specific and transparent and it has to be easy for the recipient to understand. Also, seeking consent to send commercial electronic messages isn’t something that a company can simply include in their privacy policy or within their terms and conditions. That doesn’t cut it.
Organizations also need to make sure they have the appropriate contact info included within any email messages, such as a mailing address, an email address and a phone number.
The government has established a number of exemptions to the legislation, particularly around implied consent. Implied consent includes those that have made an inquiry (reply to someone that sent us an inquiry), an ongoing subscription or membership and a referral (as long as it states that the message was sent as the result of a referral and includes the full name of the referring person). Ensuring which of your contacts fall into these categories, or whether you need to obtain consent, will most likely be one of the greatest challenges.
Marketing: How much time do you estimate your staff have spent on preparations? Do you think there could have been a cheaper and less disruptive way to achieve the same goals? Somehow that involved fewer lawyers?
Froman: After Aird & Berlis conducted an audit and provided recommendations, our IT director addressed all of them, which only took about 10% of his time. There was some back and forth with our lawyers for clarification, but that was it. Overall, the process was quite simple. The fact that we approached an expert right out of the gate and didn’t spin our wheels trying to figure out what we needed to do on our own saved us a lot of time.
Our IT director will be holding a lunch-and-learn for our entire team to go over the audit and explain the changes that were made.
Marketing: Everyone involved would probably agree the whole effort has been very disruptive. Is it worth it, from the perspective of average Canadians?
Froman: From my understanding, Canada has been a haven for spammers and not much has been done to stop them. While CASL seems disruptive, now there is recourse for the average consumer to help put an end to the endless amount of spam emails that are originating from businesses in Canada. Now the government has the legislation to go after companies that are making a living by offering spamming as a service.
There are only a few days before the legislation comes into effect. No one really knows what will happen once it becomes law, but if you are running a business in Canada and you use digital channels to communicate with consumers, clients and prospects, then you should definitely take the time to at least understand how you might be affected. If you don’t, then you can only blame yourself if you have to answer to someone afterwards.
Marketing: What about for companies going through the process—will we see a real upside, a silver lining? Some of these mailing lists must have needed some refreshing, after all.
Froman: For our AskingCanadians community, it is insurance. But for our Delvinia business, it essentially gives us a legitimate reason to refresh our lists and to initiate a dialogue with our clients and contacts. We are not only running our CASL quiz, but we are actually calling our contacts to ensure that we can continue communicating with them post-CASL.
