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Our own Neil Berman wrote in his recent MediaPost Email Insider column about lessons that email marketers can learn from the recent 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.  If it's not too late, I'd like to add one of my own.

On Friday, February 12, I tuned in to watch the Olympic opening ceremony.  I had already read online about the untimely death of Nodar Kumaritashvili, a member of the Georgian luge team who died following a crash in training earlier that day, so I wasn't surprised that NBC opened its programming by covering the story.

But I was shocked that NBC chose to air the gruesome footage of the accident.  It was among the most horrifying, disturbing things I've ever seen.  I even tweeted my disgust with the network, because no journalistic principle required it to air the moment of Kumaritashvili's death, and the standard disclaimer about "graphic" content just didn't seem like enough here.  If you haven't seen the video, I urge you, don't.  It was that unnerving and unforgettable.

But then, on Friday, February 28, I tuned in to watch the closing ceremony, and was shocked once again.  This time, it wasn't because of the video, which NBC wisely chose not to re-air.  Instead, I was shocked by my own reaction to the tribute to Kumaritashvili that was part of the ceremony.  When IOC President Jacques Rogge referred to the tragedy in his remarks, I found myself thinking, "was that only two weeks ago?"  Because it seemed like longer to me.  In fact, I had put the accident out of my mind until being reminded of it in that moment.

And this, for me, is the email marketing lesson: people forget stuff.

I'm not proud that it only took me two weeks to forget one of the most terrible and "unforgettable" things I've ever seen.  During those two weeks, it was crowded out of my consciousness by the hundreds of conversations I participated in; thousands of emails, tweets, and articles read; and dozens of other Olympic events watched.  Given the increasingly short attention spans of so many in our culture, I'm sure I wasn't alone in letting the tragedy slip from the front of my mind.

So if I can't remember the truly horrific thing that I witnessed two weeks ago, why would an email marketer expect me to remember a comparatively insignificant decision to subscribe to a mailing list three years ago?  (I'm talking to you, ancestry.com.  I haven't used your service since 2007, but you suddenly started mailing to me a couple of weeks ago.  How am I supposed to recall whether or not I opted in to receive your marketing email?)

Permission is only useful to the marketer if the recipients actually remember giving the permission.  If you sign up subscribers, but wait months or years to start mailing to them, don't be surprised if they forget about that long-ago transaction and complain about your email as spam (that is, if they address they gave you even remains valid after so much time).  For practical purposes, mailing a stale opt-in address is only somewhat less risky than mailing someone who never opted in at all.

Chris Broshears | Product Development