Q&As

Podcasting has finally come of age in the world of business-to-business marketing. A growing number of firms have adopted podcasts as a way to inform and educate their target audience, strengthen their brand, and promote their products and services.

While it is vital that you take subscribers off your e-mail newsletter list the instant they request it, there are strategies you can employ to reduce the chances that they will want to go off the list, as well as ones to encourage them to stay on.

Since it was the day before Valentine’s Day, I should have curled right up with my first issue of Loving Today: The Relationship Newsletter. But I was starting to feel trapped in this relationship.

Call it a case of bookends and bupkus: Super Bowl Sunday’s two purest direct marketing television ads — those actively engaged in selling a featured product — ran right before and right after the game. But the ads shown during the Super Bowl’s four-plus hours left something to be desired, both from a DM and, in some cases, branding perspective.

The Senate’s unanimously passed postal reform bill S. 662 Thursday morning.

The bill seeks to fundamentally remake the USPS for the first time since it came into being in 1970. It calls for:
* Having the USPS offer market-competitive products.
* Establishing a new more powerful Postal Regulatory Board to replace the current Postal Rate Commission.
* Reworking some of the USPS’s arrangements with its employees and labor unions.

The Direct Marketing Association did not join an effort supporting a lawsuit against Utah

Pizza Hut breaks new ground today with a national radio promotion and sampling blitz.

Coca-Cola has signed former Olympic gold medalist and speedskater Bonnie Blair as its newest spokesperson to kick off its 2006 Live It! program to help encourage more schools to sign up for the initiative.

Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim is partnering with Burger King Corp. to launch a new sweepstakes that dangles a grand prize to program an entire night of shows on Adult Swim.

Showtime Networks is extending viewership of its hit show The L Word with a new competition inviting viewers to write original scenes for the series.