As Groucho Marx once sang, “It’s better to live in Toronto than to live in a place you don’t want to.”
We bring this up not only because we’re old Groucho fans but because Toronto is the setting for the DMA’s annual fall conference (scheduled for Oct. 24-27). We like the town, and we believe that the conference is the place to be, if only to get a handle on our collective identity crisis.
Take a look at the conference schedule – given the number of sessions devoted to the Web and to customer relationship management, it hardly resembles the agenda of, say, five years ago.
And you don’t have be a clairvoyant to figure out why. The latest report from WEFA and the DMA predicts that online marketing media expenditures will grow at an annual rate of 45.7%, and that online sales will increase by more than 50% per annum, reaching $84.4 billion in five years.
The conference is only one proof of change; another is this issue of DIRECT, which is laden with articles and supplements on these relatively new disciplines.
Take 1to1, our start-up on one-to-one marketing. Produced as a joint venture with Marketing 1to1/Peppers and Rogers Group, the first issue covers efforts by several major firms to turn themselves into true one-to-one marketers – among them Musicland, General Motors and SunTrust. It also reports on exclusive studies from Peppers and Rogers on consumer direct and the state of one-to-one online.
The second product is e-mail dispatch, a special supplement on e-mail marketing. As editor Beth Negus reports, e-mail is now pulling staggering response rates by direct marketing standards – for example, Boise Cascade is seeing 20% to 25% click-through rates on its tests.
But change is stressful, and that’s also reflected in several articles in this issue. One is Thom Weidlich’s feature “Let’s Be Friends,” on the culture wars between old-time DMers and Web heads (page 109). Another is Kris Oser’s “Feeding the Eagles” (page 115), on the difficulty of finding and retaining good employees. This issue also contains an alarming article by Beth Negus on media hostility to direct marketing (page 121). Finally, you can read about the WEFA stats in greater detail in our annual Inside the DMA supplement.
Here’s one more plug: Conference goers should remember to check out our Show Dailies. We will report not only on the event itself, but on any major direct marketing news that breaks that week. Not going to Toronto? You can read a daily update on DIRECT Newsline (direct newsline.com).
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