Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

For years, the DMA set the standards for the direct marketing community, and in many ways it still does. The DMA provides tools for marketers to succeed, in addition to powerful representation for the marketing industry. In fact, John Greco, president and CEO of the DMA, at the opening keynote address announced that the DMA has successfully lobbied the USPS to not enact any postal rate hikes for 2010.

And while the events at the conference seemed more robust than in previous years, designed to cut across all segments of marketing with an underpinning on data and analytics, the conference itself felt like an aging grandfather. Sure the sagging economy played a large role in the declining attendance (7,000 down from 10,000 last year) and the subdued cocktail parties, but as I walked through the cavernous halls of the San Diego Convention Center designed to resemble a ship, past the hollow empty cold stone rooms, the setting seemed fitting--an aging backdrop for a relic of a conference.

While the DMA welcomes a cross-section of "new" digital technologies (let's not forget DMA06 when these companies were segregated to a separate area across the street from the Moscone Center in San Francisco) and service vendors in the exhibit hall, many of the founding fathers, a.k.a. the printing companies, catalogers, and list services vendors, still preside over the hall like Strom Thurmond in the Senate. With attendance down year after year and frustrated exhibitors, the DMA needs to step up to the digital-integrated-social-1to1-multichannel-dynamic forefront before it's too late.

During a cocktail party on Monday night, I talked to the legendary advertising pioneer Stan Rapp about this topic. He's shopping around a new discipline called iDirect and iBranding, which both rely on digital technologies to achieve the best possible outcome for customers and said that changing times requires organizations to change focus. He told me that the DMA needs to change fast and added that the future of marketing is not in direct mail. He even went so far as to recommend a name change for the DMA (apparently a committee is in place to lobby this change).

The next day as I walked around the exhibit hall, Rapp's suggestion kept ringing through my head. I began to ask marketers their opinions about the DMA's relevancy. Zain Raj, CEO of Euro RSCG Discovery, gave a passionate and heated response. He believes that the DMA needs to reinvent itself and undergo a complete paradigm shift. Not only does Raj mean that the organization must change its point of view, but the DMA must also alter its branding. He also said that the vendors there sell individual pieces of the business equation, but no one company sells how to help solve the customer's needs on a one-to-one basis. "The world has changed from commoditization to personalization. Why aren't we talking about those kinds of issues? The DMA should be leading that argument," he said. "If the DMA doesn't evolve its point of view, it will become irrelevant. When we call ourselves direct marketers we put ourselves in a box. We need to think about it from a broader scale."

Elana Anderson, of Unica, followed marketing trends for 18 years while at Forrester Research. She said the DMA needs to reach out to a whole new breed of technology providers. "Look across the exhibit hall. There're only a handful of email vendors...and the search providers aren't even here. [The DMA] is behind. The need to catch up," she said.

And Dave Lewis, CMO of Message Systems, said the DMA needs more emphasis on the digital side. "The DMA isn't keeping pace. I don't think it's that direct mail is a 'has-been,' it's the way the pace is evolving," he said. "I don't think that the DMA is as dynamic as the industry it represents."

In the introduction of Rapp's new book Reinventing Interactive and Direct Marketing, he includes a quote from James Bell, the lead scientist for the Mars Exploration Rovers. I thought it was befitting the DMA's plight: "To face tomorrow with the thought of using the methods of yesterday is to envision life at a standstill. To keep ahead, each one of us, no matter what our task, must search for new and better methods--for even that which we now do well must be done better tomorrow."