We’ve commented before on some of the tricks that people play at the edges of the education marketing industry. I wonder if there isn’t a new scam lurking around.
I was talking yesterday with a potential customer of ours, and in the meeting it was mentioned that this company had purchased a CD of school addresses, emails and the like for around £100. Upon examination it was found that the list contained many non-school addresses, and that the list was horribly inaccurate and incomplete.
Some years ago I actually tried out the list in question, and when I got the CD it had a note telling me that my anti-virus might give a warning – but this was an error by the anti-virus, and there was nothing wrong with the CD!!! McAfee had their home site listed as a major source of spam and attempts to take over computers remotely. (I tend to believe my anti-virus rather than a product).
I’ve just been sent another promotion of this nature from a different company. It says they are offering a UK telephone verified list of School, Higher and Further Education database with contacts with email, telephone, postal address and key contact name for just over £100. And it was all verified in the last 14 days.
Now I have to say quite clearly that I have not seen this firm’s data, nor do I know anything about them. All I have done is gone to their web site, and got this entertaining message back…
The server is temporarily unable to service your request due to the site owner reaching his/her bandwidth limit. Please try again later.
Which didn’t give me much confidence. (On the other hand last week the HHM sites all went down for a few hours due to a server problem – so I can’t shout too loudly).
I think the key question however is this: is it possible to verify 30,000 names, addresses and emails in 14 days, and then sell the list for eternal use for just over £100? Even if the idea is that there are a lot of firms who would buy this data irrespective of the fact that it looks too good to be true, the fact is that there is another company out there already selling just such a disk for an even cheaper price.
If you still think it is possible, think of this. It would take 142 weeks for one person to do this research – so there is quite a team working on it – and all that research cost has to be reclaimed in the price of the CD.
Let me stress, this is all speculation – I have no insights into the company and maybe there is something wrong in my figures, or maybe they have a way of doing this that I can’t imagine. But…
Disks like this are appearing all over the place, and we have to look at the implication.
Here’s my thoughts – not on this specific offer, but on such offers in general…
a) For the supplier there has to be a lot of sales to cope with this level of research – which means they have to be a fairly substantial company to do this. Obviously it is a good idea to make sure this is true.
b) Sending emails to people who should not receive them never does your company image any good – and can be illegal if there are some home addresses there (as I saw on one database), so beware of any email list you buy.
c) If there is something nasty on the CD you buy, you might find your computer system is taken over.
d) Even if the list is fine when you get it, and the company has a way of undertaking the research for a fraction of the normal price, it will go out of date very quickly. Once 5% of the addresses are wrong, then the loss in your postage costs outweighs the savings made on the list.
e) If by any chance the disk is made up of someone else’s copyright material, you can find yourself being sued. We have had a couple of cases of this, where HHM data has turned up on other people’s lists, and we have taken up the issue – our argument being that it is the duty of the purchaser to ensure that the data they are getting is owned by the firm selling it to them. It is a “buyer beware” situation – and although we try and act sympathetically, we can’t condone the use of our data bought from another firm that didn’t have the rights to it in the first place.
Of course I am biased – I work for a company that sells addresses and emails for much higher prices than those quoted for the disks, and of course everyone makes their own decisions. In the end, all I am saying is that this is a case that seems too good to be true – and most “too good to be true” cases are usually just that.
Tony Attwood