Chuck Teller, executive director of Catalog Choice, is proud of his 3 ½-year-old program and believes in the service it provides.

Launched in the fall of 2007, Catalog Choice is an online service that allows people to create a list of catalogs from which they want to receive no or less-frequent mail. The nonprofit then notifies the merchants of the opt-out request or makes a suppression file available that merchants can download from the site.

Many have viewed Catalog Choice as an adversary of direct mail. But Teller insists his program helps catalogers clean unresponsive names from their files and broker better relationships with customers who want to buy from them.

How is Catalog Choice good for direct marketers?

In 2007, Catalog Choice invented the title-specific choice program. Before the launch of Catalog Choice, there was a single preference file - the DMA Pander file, Teller says. “This has millions of names, many of whom do not want to opt-out of specific titles. By giving consumers choice at the title level, companies now only get the opt-outs that are specific to them. This is a superior model for consumer choice and company list management.”

This month five U.S. cities – Chicago, Berkeley, CA, Ithaca, N.Y., Kansas City, and Salem, OR – launched programs targeting unwanted junk mail to trim landfill waste and related disposal costs. Catalog Choice designed the program. A similar program will start in Seattle next month.

Teller says the program was prompted by requests from two cities last year.

“In early 2010, the city of Berkeley considered a resolution to tell the state to pass Do Not Mail legislation,” he explains. “As part of the staff analysis, it was recommended that the city work with either Catalog Choice or the DMA to promote a voluntary program. The city chose to work with us. In 2010, Seattle passed an ordinance that was focused on reducing unwanted phone books. In late 2010, Seattle published a public RFP for a vendor to run the opt-out registry for them. The RFP included both phone book and mail suppression. Both the DMA and the YPA (Yellow Pages Association) were at the pre-proposal meetings. We submitted our proposal in early January and were awarded the contract in late January.”

Some programs will run one year and others up to seven years.

What is the main goal of the program?

“The goals of the program are to demonstrate that self-regulation can work, and support city level waste reduction goals, generate municipal cost savings and facilitate citizen engagement,” Teller says. “It is a win-win-win because companies can cleanse their marketing lists and improve targeting, communities can reduce waste for less than it costs to pick it up and dispose or recycle it, and consumers win by choosing the direct marketing that they want to receive and opting out of the ones that they don’t want.”

Currently, there are 1.3 million registered Catalog Choice members, Teller says. “On an average day, the percentage of site traffic from returning visitors is over 60%. From a site traffic perspective, we are the largest privacy portal in the U.S.”

What about the catalogers fearful of your organization?

“For the most part, the catalog industry has been very cooperative,” Teller says. “Over 90% of the top 100 catalog mailers work with us under contract or accept opt-outs sent to their customer service centers without issue.”

Teller says companies should work with Catalog Choice because “we make the process efficient and we don’t charge for our suppression file. We are not a third-party, we are the agent of the consumer and they are initiating the submission of the request.”

The “choice” is all yours.