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LESS THAN A WEEK AFTER Direct Marketing Association president John Greco vowed in his keynote speech at DMA05 in Atlanta that the association would strive to communicate the industry's benefits to society and the economy more clearly, a big fat hanging softball of a chance to defend marketing came over the plate — and the DMA whiffed.

The Oct. 23 San Francisco Chronicle ran a fairly typical consumer media hit piece on marketers by columnist David Lazarus. We've all seen these pieces. If they had sound, Alfred Hitchcock's “Psycho” shower-scene music would play whenever the words “marketer” or “marketing” appeared.

Lazarus' column begins: “The Direct Marketing (Wreek! wreek! wreek! wreek!) Association, an industry group for companies that send people pitches they didn't ask for, announced the other day that its members now stand at the front lines in the war on spam. The association said its members — including most leading retailers, banks and publishers — will be required to adopt e-mail authentication systems over the next few months.”

No one claims authentication will stop spam. Authentication is simply one way for e-mail inbox providers to tell when incoming e-mail is a forgery and should be treated as a possible scam attempt. Proponents also see it as a way to fight fraud while working toward a way for ISPs to keep scorecards on the servers that send mass e-mail so ISPs can more efficiently process or divert e-mail as it arrives based on how “spammy” the reputation of the sending servers is.

The DMA's requiring members to authenticate is simply a matter of good Internet citizenship, nothing more.

But Lazarus needs a column and marketers (Wreek! wreek! wreek! wreek!) doing the right thing just won't do.

“Will this be a plus for consumers?” he asks. “It depends on whom you ask and how you define spam.”

After Lazarus writes the obligatory “DMA-says-this-is-a-win-win; privacy-advocate-says-people-will-get-more-spam” passage, he writes: “The catch here is that, legally speaking, not all spam is alike.

“According to the federal Can Spam Act of 2003, spam doesn't include ‘transactional or relationship messages’ from companies with which a consumer has had past dealings.

“‘What that means,’ [Chris] Hoofnagle [head of the Electronic Privacy Information Center's West Coast office] said, ‘is that if you bought a book from some vendor at some point in your life, that vendor could send you e-mail every week. Most people would consider that spam.’

“Not so, responded Stephanie Hendricks, a spokeswoman for the Direct Marketing Association,” Lazarus continues.

“‘Spam is only something that comes from somebody who doesn't identify the sender or misidentifies the sender,’ she said. ‘Or if you opt out and still get e-mails. That's spam.’

Ouch. We knew that was coming. The above “definition” emerged two years ago under former DMA president H. Robert Wientzen.

Message to everyone at the DMA: For the love of God, would you please remove Wientzen's definition of spam from your institutional brains once and for all, surgically if necessary? Spam is unsolicited bulk e-mail. From the moment Hendricks defines spam as only fraudulent e-mail or e-mail sent to someone who has opted out, the reader has the impression that the DMA thinks consumers are all a bunch of drool-bucket morons. As a result, anything the DMA says concerning spam from that point forward is sneer bait.

By the time Lou Mastria, the DMA's vice president for interactive and emerging media, is quoted at the end of Lazarus' column acknowledging that authentication will only stop certain types of spam and that there is no “silver bullet,” marketing's cause is long lost.

Sigh. The industry deserves better.

Here are some boilerplate points that could have been made:

Most consumers call any e-mail they don't want spam. But people often sign up for e-mail lists and then forget. As a result, the Can Spam Act was written aiming to help prosecute the Internet's worst spammers while allowing responsible marketers to continue to use e-mail, an extremely cost-effective way to communicate with customers. While not all marketers are responsible, most see little value in making customers mad and understand the differences between direct mail and e-mail. Authentication won't cure spam. It is simply the right thing to do. As a result, it's a requirement for DMA membership.

Now, was that so hard?