📧 Should issuers email you?

[JFWooten4]

Basically, the law¹ says issuers can’t email/mail investors based on the TA contact information for anything other than a proxy campaign. I’ve heard some murmurings these last few weeks of potential disdain from this, and wanted to have a productive dialogue around everyone’s perspectives! 🫱🏼‍🫲🏽 So, what do you think, do you want any 'ol (marketing) communication from companies you've invested with? 🤔

Footnotes

1. I can make the precise legal citations if you’d like (it’s circa the electronic delivery rules). But I sort of wanted to keep this chat higher-level since it’s in the Org discussions. I would cite it if we were talking about explicit policy recommendations in the SEC-Comments repo. ↩

[JamesAlfonse]

An opportunity to opt-in to an issuer's marketing communication makes sense to me, provided there's clear guidelines on what is acceptable and what is not. For example, an initial buy-in or transfer of directly registered shares shows a vested interest in a company and could warrant the option to sign up for marketing material (mail, emails, etc.). Where it may start to get dicey for the TA is when the issuer could potentially bombard the investor with unwanted repetitive material. If TAs have to patrol and use extra resources to ensure some sort of compliance from issuers on this, the end result may not be worth it for them. I could see the argument for both sides for/against this. Speaking for me personally, I would love to sign up for email alerts through my TA on shares that I own in a way that may not overlap with email alerts that I already have set up through the issuer themselves.

@JFWooten4 Thanks for bringing this up, and I hope to hear other perspectives on this important topic!