One of the recurring themes at MobHappy is the slow death of traditional interruptive marketing, where people are forced, by various means, to stop what they are doing to listen to a marketing message.

Of all the techniques practiced, there can be few more interruptive marketing methods than telephone marketing - where someone phones you while you’re having supper to woodenly read you a script about one of their double glazing “consultants” being in your area and would just love to visit and tell you all about their products.

So it’s hardly surprising to anyone that the UK’s Telephone Preference Society (TPS) has reached the 10 million mark (via Brand Republic, free reg required). The TPS, despite its euphemistic name, simply allows people to opt out of all telephone marketing calls.

To put this into perspective, there are about 22 million households in the UK, which means that nearly half of them have expressed this preference now. I will qualify that slightly by saying that you can also opt out mobile numbers and I don’t have any information on the split, though I will ask and write an update if the info is available. Gut feel says it’ll be a fairly small number though.
UPDATE: It is actually only 3.3% of the file, so the argument holds. Phew!

A further interesting little nugget in the same article is that a recent Mori poll found that awareness of the TPS had risen to nearly 50%. Spelling this out, it means that practically everyone who knows about it, registers.

This is clearly a big worry for outbound call centres, who were recently outraged when BT started to actively promote their Privacy Service, which includes a big plug for the TPS. Registration has indeed increased following BT’s initiative, which seems to be supporting the theory that everyone who finds out about it, joins.

A nice bit of additional irony to consider is that the TPS is paid for by the direct marketing industry themselves - there’s no government subsidy or anything. Therefore, the industry is facing rapidly increasing costs in the face of a rapidly decreasing pool of customers it can piss off approach - and I assume rapidly decreasing profits. There must come a point (maybe two years away) when the economics dictate that this is a dead industry.

So if you run an outbound call centre, you really should change your model pretty quick now. The writing is on the wall - people don’t like your service and feel so strongly about it that they’ll overcome their natural inertia and do something about it.

For other traditional marketers, it’s also a clear indication of the way the winds are blowing in modern marketing. People don’t want to be interrupted anymore and your only hope is engagement marketing - a term you’re going to hear a lot more in the future.