Q&As

This spring, hundreds of thousands of students found out their grades for the semester over the phone. Before they heard the good (or bad) news they listened

A FEW TRENDS have come to light in our semiannual roundup of new database products. Most strikingly, the advent of increasingly powerful desktop computers

Marketers spent an estimated $5.14 billion on promotional licenses in 1997, a 3 percent increase driven mostly by film tie-ins. At the same time, consumer

DM mergers, acquisitions and buyouts in the first quarter of 1998 grew 99% over the first quarter of 1997, according to a study released in June by DM

The Direct Marketing Association has named Roscoe Burton Starek III senior vice president, catalog industry. Starek is a former federal trade commissioner

Demarcation lines have faded. Direct marketers are respectable at last. Almost as respectable as general advertising executives. Certainly as respectable

We feel toward serial mailings the way most people feel toward serial killers. However, unlike serial killers, serial mailings are sometimes amusing.

Publishing files, once the most basic of lists, are now being offered to mailers with a variety of bells and whistles, including modeling, regression

Marketers last year spent $13.1 billion on point-of-purchase displays, an increase of 5 percent above 1996.Some segments had growth rates that exceeded

Brits always claim to produce the best advertising in the world. Something about our quirky sense of humor and literate consumer base leads to the often-repeated