Loose Cannon: Will DM Take Collateral Damage in the Anti-Clinton Wars?
There are many good reasons for direct marketers to follow the dustup between data compiler infoUSA and hedge fund Dolphin Financial Partners. One is that a juicy proxy fight can be a hell of a lot of fun. But another is that the entire industry could take some heat if one of the players is cast as a political liability for a presidential candidate.
The infoUSA/Dolphin story is nominally about control of a major firm in the data compiling industry. But despite a protracted war of dueling press releases, given the relatively small number of stock shares publicly available the likelihood of infoUSA’s CEO Vinod Gupta losing the reins of the company is minimal.
Recent media coverage, however, has given the plot some nastier turns. And those twists could result in knee-jerk reactions against the direct marketing industry, especially if folks locked in various political contests (presidential and otherwise) decide to use anti-DM sentiment to score cheap points.
Two recent articles in the New York Times exemplify this: In the first, the Times takes to task both infoUSA and commercial bank Wachovia for practices that allegedly allowed no-goodniks to defraud senior citizens.
This story was followed a week later by a flat-out hatchet job tying one of those companies to presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton. (Which company? I
