Tuesday, June 19, 2007By: Des Cahill, CEO
"Road Noise" was the title of an audio journal I made during a long and interesting car journey through the Pacific Northwest sometime in the late 80's. The exact date and route is somewhat fuzzy. I visited various relatives and friends in Northern California, Oregon and Washington during that epic journey - and the tape has achieved mythic cult status amongst this group. Who can forget the interview with the sorority sisters in Eugene or the entry from I-5 just north of Medford when we nearly got clipped by that semi?
Well, I'm resurrecting the brand. Road Noise is appropriate as I've been traveling a lot this last month. MAAWG in Dublin, then a quick jaunt to London for eTail and hop over the pond to New York for the Stevie Awards last week. DM Days in New York this week. And more to come in July with the FTC Spam Summit in DC. Once again, it's all a little fuzzy. So here's a Road Noise post on these past few days in New York and DM Days. It'll help me remember the key happenings and hopefully provide an interesting perspective for you.
Ahhhh, New York City in the early summer. Warm weather. Times Square. Street vendors. Food carts. Groups of tourists. Throngs of tourists. Tourists everywhere. Buses and hotels full of them. All from Europe or Asia - yes, the falling dollar has made $500. hotel rooms a bargain if you're paying in pounds, yen, or euros. New York is a great place to be in June, but it isn't a place to seek solitude.
But if you're in the online marketing or email business, then a great place for some alone time would've been the Jacob Javitz Convention Center where DM Days was being held. The conference was fairly well attended, but it wasn't an INBOX level affair. 95 percent of the vendors and attendees were in the off-line list business. There was a small interactive enclave, but the only friendly faces I saw exhibiting were FreshAddress and ListTrack. There was an all-day email 101 track that Austin Bliss was running, and he was kind enough to invite me to present at one of the sessions on compliance and best practices. It was well attended and reminded me that there are a lot of email marketers out there who don't know about authentication or reputation, and are still trying to figure out best practices basics. There is still a lot of education and outreach to be done through the AOTA, ESPC, MAAWG and of course, the DMA.
So, I give a bleak review of DM Days. This morning, I pointed out DMA's lack of relevance to online marketers to someone in the industry. "Why doesn't the DMA 'get' interactive marketing?" I said, "ad:tech is eating the DMA's lunch with their conferences." My breakfast guest pointed out that the DMA, unlike ad:tech, does more than conferences. It covers a broader spectrum of marketing activities and does extensive policy work and outreach through its lobbying efforts. He pointed out that the DMA may not be the best at representing best practices standards in email or online marketing but, "the DMA is a lot like the U.S. It's imperfect, it's powerful, it's influential and until someone or something else comes along, it's the only game in town."
Great line I thought.
So if the fear of being surpassed by Japan motivated U.S. economic and educational reform in the 80's, and fear of being surpassed by China may yet motivate the U.S. to be more globally competitive in the latter part of this decade - who is going to motivate the DMA to get more attuned to the radical shift in marketing dollars to the online world?
