Live From New Orleans: New CEO Calls for Member Input
The Direct Marketing Association needs to “protect its brand” by building trust, service and value among both consumers and members. That’s the message DMA president and CEO John A. Greco Jr. brought during his first keynote speech at the helm of the organization yesterday.
Greco told attendees of the DMA conference in New Orleans that unethical operations by non-member marketers and public concern about data privacy run the risk of increasing regulatory pressures from government. If that happens, “We won’t be in business — at least, not as we know it today,” he warned. “I am committed to exploring every avenue to build and enhance public trust in ways that will keep the direct marketing channel open.”
One of those avenues will involve compiling testimonials of great service that customers have received from DMA members. In a press conference following his speech, Greco said these consumer success stories might be used by members in their local markets, conversations with regulators or possibly in a branded advertising campaign by the DMA.
Another initiative will take member input received online in September and translate it into a new strategic plan for the DMA’s next five years. This plan, slated to be completed at the January 2005 DMA directors meeting, will answer the big questions about what activities the DMA will continue and how much money they will allocate. This strategizing might involve re-examining some existing DMA conferences, although Greco told reporters no decisions had been made to discontinue any current activities.
Building consensus and breaking down the walls among different “silos” of interest will also get top priority. Unlike single-industry trade groups, the DMA’s membership represents a diverse group of companies with some shared and some unique concerns. Greco vowed that he and DMA leadership would bridge those gaps wherever doing so would be beneficial to members. For example, he said, it might be appropriate to bring the Association for Interactive Marketing and the Internet Alliance closer into the DMA fold. While it was “probably right in the past” for these affiliates to remain apart from the association, Greco said that with as many as 80% of DMA members doing interactive marketing, the association needs to make sure that every one of them can benefit from AIM’s expertise.
Greco hopes to make the DMA will become a center of operational excellence. “I want to make certain that what we’re doing, we are doing very well within our budgets, and as professionally as possible,” he said. This will include state-of-the-art direct and interactive marketing practices in online practices, creative content, segmentation and database services–all done in conjunction with member committees. “After all, you’re the hands-on experts,” he told.
On the political front, Greco outlined for members the slate of issues the DMA expects to face in the coming legislative year: everything from environmental impact, outbound telemarketing restrictions and remote sales taxes to postal reform and spam controls.
In particular, Greco expects Congress will take “a hard look” at the list and online practices of the DM industry, following the settlement of fraud claims last August by the Federal Trade Commission against three list firms that allegedly violated telemarketing sales and the levying of $187,500 in fines.
But conversations with the FTC last Thursday left Greco confident that the commission’s standards for pursuing such list violation cases will remain “reasonable.” He said the DMA expects to issue best-practices guidelines for list firms based on those FTC conferences within the week.
