Marketing as traditional direct marketers knew it is dead, thanks to the disruptive power of the Internet. Of course, says Jerry Shereshewsky of Yahoo!, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Shereshewsky addressed attendees at the Direct Marketing to Business (DMB) conference, yesterday, here at the Palmer House Hilton.
The Web brings everything into the moment, meaning marketers are no longer distanced from the presence, he said, noting that the Internet is disruptive because its influence penetrated the population so quickly. While the telephone took 75 years to reach mass usage among the population and the telephone 30 years, Internet penetration took less than half a decade.
A convergence of marketing and sales is the result of Internet penetration, said Shereshewsky. Marketing used to be “sexy, remote and unaccountable,” while sales was “prosaic, intimate and accountable.” The marketing of tomorrow, he said, will be “intimate, immediate and accountable–identical to sales.”
“I feel like I’ve arrived in the promised land,” he said. “There is no better time to be a direct marketer.”
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