Tuesday, October 23, 2007By: J.F. Sullivan, VP Marketing
As I flew from Chicago, both physically and metaphorically, treasuring my autographed copy of a Joe Frazier poster, numerous, unmatched, $.59 per 1000 unit pens and a throbbing tequila induced migraine it occurred to me what was wrong with my annual DMA experience. The problem with the annual conference is that it's a desultory activity.
I say this because I wanted to use the word desultory and also because it is very true. It's not that the DMA is too big. It really isn't. The conference next door, the National Safety Council, was three times larger but appeared to be much more cogent to its assembled multitude. The problem is that the interests of the DMA attendees have broadened to the point that one single monolithic conference cannot possibly address the range of interests.
The average marketer is like the average doctor, very specialized. They focus on search, they focus on email marketing, they focus on making really cool 3D magnets for your refrigerator. But "they" are not the same person; they are the various segments of marketers. By becoming the largest aggregation of activity around direct marketing, the DMA has lost its specific compelling drivers for the segments of its attendees.
The DMA should produce separate promotion, email and other segmentation conferences. Those segments could occur back to back like the search and email conferences of that other, not to be mentioned here, organization. That way folks who interested in the collection of all that the DMA offers could spend the equivalent number of days. In other words, the 0.5% of the attendees that currently find relevance for all that the DMA has become.
At the very least I say there are at least two. On-line and Direct Mail. So let's start there, and I'll see you at the craps tables...
