Guiding Direct Marketing into the Mainstream
Over the past few months, I have been privileged to attend academic and professional conferences/seminars/ meetings in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the US. Some, such as the European Direct Marketing Association meeting in Brussels, have been directly related to direa and database marketing. Others have been peripheral, such as the International Conference on Corporate Advertising and Communications at Keele University in England, or the International Newspaper Marketing Association meeting in Banff, Canada.
Academics were in attendance at all these meetings. In some, they had substantial leadership and speaking roles. In others, they were observers or participants in the discussions and proceedings. And, as you might expect, some presentations were brilliant, and some sounded a bit unrelated to the subject and the content of the meetings. But that is to be expected. What surprised me at these meetings was how little the academics who are not directly involved in direct or database marketing knew about the subject. And that included some who were deeply involved in the new technology and new media forms such as the World Wide Web and the