Q&As

Six men have been charged with participation in an Internet phishing scam that used e-mail and phony Internet greeting cards to steal credit card numbers, bank account numbers and other personal information from AOL users, the U.S. Department of Justice announced last week.

Best Buy’s recent announcement to drop its $9.99 loyalty program membership fee, one of the worst-kept secrets in the industry for the past six months, is a timely example of a key element of loyalty program management:

Broadly defined, customer capacity is the total amount of a category that a customer consumes. In both business-to-business and business-to-consumer it includes how much a customer buys from us and from our competitors

During the past two years, data aggregators, credit card processors and consumer-facing firms have lost, compromised or sold to no-goodniks roughly 98 million private records, according to The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse.

Direct marketers, the means to data security are in your sales files. I propose a new system that will bring direct response marketing front-and-center to the national information security discourse

Buena Vista Television is hyping up its TV show According to Jim with a 45 million-piece mailing from Valpak and a sweepstakes dangling the chance to win $25,000.

I’M GETTING MORE AND MORE STEAMED AT HIT-AND-RUN DIRECT marketers. Who or what are hit-and-runners? They’re the ones who know a couple of action words

The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute is a nonprofit membership organization in California dedicated to finding signs of life

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton has introduced a far-reaching privacy bill that could spell deep trouble for any business that uses so-called personally

HERE’S A STATISTIC THAT PROBABLY SHOULDN’T SURPRISE ANYONE. Of the list companies polled by Direct in its 2006 list use survey (see supplement following

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