Former Capital One marketing chief Justin Basini is backing a new preference service which claims to put consumers in charge of their own data by allowing them to choose which brands can contact them.
Called Allow, the service is a joint venture between Basini and Howard Huntley. It is offering to remove customers from marketing databases and register them with opt-out services such as the Mail Preference Service (MPS) and Email Preference Service.
Allow will then sell a customer’s data back to companies once they have chosen which brands they want to receive mail from. Profit will be split between the customer and Allow.
Basini said: “It became clear to us that something needed to change in the way that marketers communicate with their customers, giving more control to the individual. This would be much more efficient for both the people and the companies.”
He claims the company is one of the first to create a business model around the ‘Volunteered Personal Information’ market.
However, as far back as early 2001, The Preference Service – a joint venture between Royal Mail and Royal Dutch Post – launched with the aim of bringing advertisers and consumers together.
In August 2005, the company was acquired by IPT, which now claims the combined data resource of IPT and The Preference Service offer a lifestyle database of 10.6 million records, of which 3.4 million have email addresses. IPT claims the file is growing at the rate of 10,000 records every month.