Sunday’s Annual Business Meeting of the Direct Marketing Association saw 10 new members approved for the DMA’s board. But the day also served as a demarcation point for an organization undergoing a shift in focus and structure. DMA board chair G. Steven Dapper spoke with Direct Newsline about a mixture of planned changes and possible directions.
The immediate definite changes include the incoming class of board members, a group which includes:
Bruce Biegel, managing director of Winterberry Group, LLC; Deborah I. Fine, president and CEO of Direct Brands, Inc.; Moses Foster, president and CEO of Epsilon; Susan Loth, CMO at Disabled American Veterans; Suresh Mathai, CEO of Continuum Global; John Papalia, president and CEO of Statlistics; Charles Prescott, Principal of the Prescott Report; and Beth Smith, president of Smith Browning Direct, Inc. Mathai, Papalia and Prescott had previously served as adjunct member representatives on the board.
All have been appointed for full three-year terms. Biegel, Foster and Loth will additionally be joining the DMA’s Executive committee.
Additionally, Susan D. Goodman, CEO of Goodman&Co., took over the role of board secretary from Brian Wolfe.
Other changes require a Nov. 2 member vote before they can be made final. But according to DMA bylaws, because the board unanimously voted to approve the changes, only 10% of DMA voting members need to vote yea – and Dapper is confident the vote will reach, if not far surpass, that threshold.
Should the proposed changes take hold, look for the DMA board to shrink during the next three years. The board currently consists of 39 full members, a group that includes the past five DMA board chairs. During the next three years that will shrink to 29 members, only three of whom will be immediate past chairs. The reductions will come as existing board members reach the end of their three-year terms, and some seats will not be refilled.
“It’s going back to the size it was in 1998 or 2000,” Dapper told Direct Newsline. “Everyone thinks it is too large a board.”
Dapper also indicated that the organization would be reviving a focus on international outreach efforts, and that revived focus would include additional financial resources. According to Dapper, the current annual conference is hosting significant attendee contingents from France, Japan, Argentina and Denmark.
The DMA will also be enhancing its efforts in education. During its most recent fiscal year, which ended June 30, the organization cut educational services expenditures by 57%, from $2.1 million to just over $907,000.
That cut didn’t reflect a shift in the DMA’s priorities, Dapper stressed, but rather the requirements of an organization that had experienced a sharp revenue drop during the year.
The DMA is conducting several studies of market segments. While these studies are ongoing, and the DMA is not releasing any results it may have, Dapper suggested that the findings could possibly lead to changes in the organization’s structure. Pressed for examples, Dapper offered the hypothetical situation of organizing internal departments around consumer media usage, but stressed that this was speculative, at best.
Above all, the DMA board will strive to provide DMA executive leadership with macro-trend observations. In addition to the focus on global marketing, this input could include data, digital and design trends.
The current conference program reflects a heightened focus on the first two, with several breakout sessions emphasizing data collection and integration from a variety of online channels. Design work, Dapper said, includes how consumer-facing programs are developed from beginning to end.
There’s one more hard change, although Dapper did not position it as such. In some recent years, former DMA president and CEO John A. Greco was given salary increases to which he was contractually entitled. The raises went into effect despite drops in membership and revenue, but board members consistently refused to discuss what conditions were met to trigger Greco’s raises.
This is no longer the case. Current DMA CEO Lawrence M. Kimmel’s salary increase will be based on new membership and bottom line growth, Dapper said. The organization will also look at the quality of the DMA’s education programs and shows, staff happiness and other metrics, although Dapper was not clear on what impact, if any, these measurements would have on Kimmel’s compensation.
Kimmel has already met, or come close to meeting, at least one self-established benchmark, according to Dapper. Kimmel had set an internal goal of 10,000 attendees for DMA 2010 annual, and while the organization has not released attendance figures, Dapper was sanguine that the actual number of registrants would be close to that. And pre-registrants for the upcoming National Center for Database Marketing conference in December are 100% above where they were at this time last year, Dapper added.
