Q&As

The Court of Appeals of Virginia has upheld the first conviction under a state law that makes spamming a felony.

The U.S. Postal Service posted a net loss of $268 million for July. When taking into account a $250 million monthly escrow allocation, the net loss was $518 million.

L. William “Bill” McNutt Jr., chairman of the Collin Street Bakery, died Friday at his home in Corsicana, TX of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, according to wire service reports. He was 81.

AirportParkingReservations.com, a Web site that helps guarantee airport parking space for U.S. travelers, has chosen Crossbow Group to develop and manage its paid search effort.

Macy’s breaks its first national ads and a slate of local events as 400 regional department stores convert to the Macy’s name this weekend.

Pokémon USA is riding high with Amtrak and Viz Media under a new sweepstakes that will send a family of four to the Big Apple to tour the company’s headquarters.

In the pressure of today’s business environment to produce quantifiable results, the challenge of measuring marketing effectiveness has been, well, perverted.

For all the noise about marketing analytics’ importance, there’s very little actual spark. A survey of marketing professionals revealed that more than half believe their dashboard use, marketing ROI technology use or projections employing ROI planning is weaker than it should be.

If you’ve been in direct marketing for more than a few months, you already know the basics of setting up test cells that will deliver statistically projectable results measurement. However, you should consider creating an enterprise-wide control group–to help you determine the value of your database marketing program.

If there is a single inviolate rule in database marketing, this is it. It’s just amazing how often otherwise very smart marketers discover that they’ve put a campaign, a new product launch, sometimes even an entire database marketing program together without first determining with specificity how they’re going to measure it on the backend to figure out how much money they made or lose in the effort.