DMA president and CEO John A. Greco met with trade reporters last evening during his first press conference in several months, but offered little more than what was in his keynote speech yesterday morning.
When asked what the attendance figures were for this year’s conference, Greco said he had already given the figure during his speech: “More than 10,000 people.”
However, more than 10,000 people have attended every recent fall conference, except for possibly the conference in Chicago just after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. In recent years, the DMA has stopped releasing the number of attendees and exhibitors at the show and has refused to explain why.
Exhibitors like to know how many attendees are at conferences so they can gage how a particular conference stacks up against other shows.
“We are releasing figures that reflect the honesty about what’s here in terms of the approximate size of the audience,” Greco said. “I think the mistake we would make if we tried to be more precise on every conference would be dealing with issues of mix. We have a wonderful turnout here. It has been strong since post 2001. We’re very pleased with the turnout, and we are taking another step in the direction of releasing the kind of information that you have been asking for by stating that it is over 10,000. And I think… I know that we’ll be doing that at every conference in terms of giving you at least a baseline for what’s there.”
Meanwhile, Greco reiterated that the DMA voted yesterday to require members to adopt e-mail authentication systems. Those who don’t risk losing their memberships, he said.
MSN and Hotmail will begin in November to flag as potential spam incoming messages for which its servers can’t verify senders’ return address information. As a result, any unauthenticated e-mail, even customer service messages, may start ending up in receivers’ junk mail folders.
Some industry leaders fear that too many companies that send e-mail, but not necessarily commercial e-mail to consumers, will fail to see the benefits of authenticating their messages and put the industry wide attempt to fight spam and phishing in jeopardy.
Spam and so-called phishing — fraudulent e-mail that purports itself as coming from a legitimate financial institution or service provider in order to get consumers to hand over their account numbers and passwords — are costing ISPs ever more money to fight. As a result, mailbox providers are pressuring e-mail senders to adopt various e-mail authentication solutions to combat the return address forgery so common in online scams.
The DMA did not implement the requirement at the request of ISPs, Greco said.
He also said member companies have 60 to 90 days in order to begin authenticating their outbound e-mail. “It is a relatively straightforward, easy process.”
The DMA does not endorse any particular type of authentication, he said.
Greco began the briefing by assuring the trade reporters and editors in the room that the DMA’s inMarketing magazine is not aimed at competing with any of them. “It is absolutely not our intention at all to detract from the existing publications or position inMarketing against them in any way,” he said. “The publication is intended as a better alternative to the various written publications that we have been using.”
Direct marketing trade publishers have been complaining since inMarketing was announced that the DMA was competing with its trade press members by selling ads.
When asked if inMarketing was profitable, Greco said, “we are investing in this. This is a member communications vehicle. We are offsetting some of our costs with it. It is an investment that is collapsing many of the other vehicles that we’ve used in the past, each of which were invested in by us, and we’ve had some advertising revenue in them already so we’re really just shifting those dollars around within the mix. I do not look at this as a profit center. I look at it as a member communications vehicle that in the best interest of our members, we should subsidize to the best degree possible so that we don’t need to raise members’ dues.”
When pressed on whether or not inMarketing is profitable, Greco said tersely, “I’m not sure that’s a question we really should be dealing with here. Are we going to have an editorial discussion or a business meeting discussion here? I’m not sure where we’re going with this. I’ve made my statement.”
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