How come the DMA's Telephone Preference Service (TPS) is such a failure?

by Richard M. Smith
http://www.ComputerBytesMan.com
December 21, 2002

How come the Direct Marketing Association's (DMA) Telephone Preference Service (TPS) is such a failure? According to the DMA's Web site approximately 4.5 million consumers have signed up for the service to cut-down on telemarketers from calling their homes [1]. This sounds like a lot of people, untill you consider that this number represents only about 5% of the households in the United States.

However, state-run do-not-call lists are significantly more successful. Here are some figures from a May 2002 Boston Globe article [2]:

New York, 2 million households (25 percent)
Missouri, 1 million households, (40 percent)
Tennessee 700,000 (35 percent)

The DMA has gone on record as opposing efforts by the FTC to establish a national do-not-call list claiming that the current TPS solution works just fine [3]:

"The DMA is opposed to a government list. It is unnecessary and redundant because The DMA already maintains a national list, the Telephone Preference Service (TPS). Also, a national list would not pre-empt the state DNC lists, and it would have many unfair exemptions. Therefore, we will continue working to remind policymakers and consumers that our TPS is an effective way to suppress names from national calling lists."

If the TPS works as effectively as the DMA claims, how come the participation rate in the DMA's do-not-call service is so much lower compared to similar do-not-call services run by various states?

References

[1] Telephone Preference Service
    http://preference.the-dma.org/products/tpssubscription.shtml

[2] Consumer laws aim to disconnect telemarketers
    By Fred Kaplan, Boston Globe, 5/18/2002 

[3] INDUSTRY UPDATE: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES
    http://www.the-dma.org/aboutdma/presidentsreport.shtml