Nobody enjoys the compliance conversation. It is also the one that decides whether a call program is an asset or a liability, so here is the working version: what to have in place, what to ask a vendor, and where to stop and call a lawyer.
This is not legal advice. It is a checklist a buyer can actually run.
Prior express written consent, in plain terms
For marketing calls and texts to a consumer's mobile phone, the standard most buyers work to is prior express written consent. In practice that means the consumer saw a disclosure, the disclosure named the business that would contact them, it said the contact might be automated, and the consumer agreed in a way you can reproduce later.
Two words there carry the weight. Named means the consumer knew who was going to call. Reproduce means you can show what the page said on the day they agreed, not what it says today.
The one-to-one consent question
The FCC wrote a rule requiring consent to name one seller at a time. A federal appeals court vacated it before it took effect, so the rule is not in force.
Buyers kept the standard anyway, and that is worth understanding. A consent record naming your company specifically holds up under scrutiny in a way a checkbox authorizing a list of unnamed marketing partners does not, whether or not a rule compels it. Most serious buyers now treat one-to-one as a purchasing requirement rather than a legal one. Where the line sits for your business is a question for your counsel, and the answer keeps moving as courts and regulators work on it.
What consent documentation looks like
A consent record you can defend holds more than a timestamp.
- The certificate or token. Jornaya LeadiD and TrustedForm are the common ones. They capture the session and let a third party attest to what happened on it.
- The disclosure text as displayed. Not a link to the current version of the page. The words that were on screen at that moment.
- The page and the source. Which form, which campaign, which partner.
- Retention. The records have to still exist when somebody asks, which is usually much later than anyone plans for.
We build our SMS and web funnels so those four travel with the lead record into your system. A consent file that lives only in a vendor's platform is a file you do not have.
Recording disclosure
Call recording law is not uniform. Some states require every party on the line to consent to being recorded and others do not, and which state's law governs a call that crosses state lines is a real question with a non-obvious answer. Common practice is to disclose at the top of the call and to keep the disclosure inside the recording itself. Have your own counsel approve the wording and tell you how to handle multi-state calls.
Revocation
Treat any reasonable request to stop as a request to stop. A consumer who says stop on a call, replies STOP to a text, sends an email, or tells an agent to take them off the list has revoked. The safe posture is to honor the request through whatever channel it arrived on, act within days rather than weeks, and suppress that person everywhere at once: every list, every sequence, every dialer, and the ad audiences too.
Suppression that covers one system and misses another is the failure mode here. It is also what produces a second call after someone already asked you to stop, which is the call that gets you sued.
The checklist to run against a vendor
Five questions, asked before signing.
- Can you produce the consent record for a specific call within one business day?
- Do recordings exist for every call, and can I hear them on request?
- Who is the seller of record on the disclosure the consumer actually saw?
- What happens to a revocation, and how far does the suppression reach?
- Who generated the traffic, and can you name them?
A vendor who answers all five quickly has built the plumbing. A vendor who needs a week to find one consent record has already told you what you needed to know.
We publish what we require from media partners for the same reason. None of this is legal advice, and none of it substitutes for your own counsel reviewing your program before it runs.