The Old College Try: In Vermont, ‘Affinity Marketing’ Targets Alumni
By Eichacker, Charles | |
Proquest LLC |
Imagine that you get' a letter from an insurance company. Because you or your child attended a certain college, the letter enthuses, you could save up to 10 percent on a car insurance plan. A disclaimer mentions that your school's alumni association receives a fee for allowing the company to market those savings. It also directs you to a website where you can unsubscribe from future communications.
Do you take advantage of the savings? Chuck the letter? Hit that website to opt out of future solicitations? Or do you contact the alumni association directly, worried that your personal information has been sold for profit?
In a process known as "affinity marketing," some companies pay fees to membership organizations - trade and alumni groups, for example - for the right to market discounted services to people on their contact lists. In
The way Liberty Mutual compensates those alumni groups varies from school to school. At UVM, where alumni relations are handled through the
"The reason that the colleges do it is because it's win-win-win," says Lauren Phillie, director of development and alumni relations at
But some alumni and privacy advocates don't view those partnerships so sympathetically - even if they are legal and lead to offers of cheaper service from a Fortune 100 company such as Liberty Mutual. Affinity marketing isn't new, explains
For the corporation, "It's obviously the allure of using an existing channel where there is already people with whom the entity, the partner, has some sort of relationship," Grant says. "We certainly don't have an overarching privacy law like most other developed countries of the world do. It's a real problem. It's very frustrating, because you would think you could at least get something enacted that would give people a choice."
Out of the roughly 10,000
Phillie doesn't believe the word "selling" describes what Johnson is doing. College officials upload a fresh contact list to a secure website for every approved marketing blast. Johnson's contract with Liberty Mutual prohibits the insurance company from saving those addresses, and no other personal information is shared until the next round of marketing.
"We don't collect any data," says
Such assurances don't placate one UVM alumnus who recently registered his own complaint with the
In a subsequent series of emails to the
In response,
The federal CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 only requires that companies emailing advertisements allow recipients to opt out of future communications. Instead, Ellenbogen says, he'd like to see the
It's not clear how many of Ellenbogen's fellow alums share his concerns. The Consumer Protection Unit of the
What other companies are employing the "affinity" approach? Discover recently started offering a branded credit card to UVM alums and parents. At
Other alumni associations around
With or without an opt-in policy, St. Mike's and other schools remain free to go that route. That fact, says Grant, is a troubling sign of the times. Ever more personal information is flying across the internet every day, she says, that is worth a lot to companies.
"There is a lot of resistance to any sort of federal legislation on the part of companies, and that resistance is only getting tougher in this era of 'Big Data,' " Grant says. "The presumption is not that you're in control of your information being shared ... It's just not where we're at." ®
OFF THE BAT, THEY'RE LIKE 'WAIT A MINUTE, WHOA, SOMEONE SOLD MY NAME?'
LAUREN PHILLIE
Contact: [email protected]
Copyright: | (c) 2014 Seven Days |
Wordcount: | 1232 |
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