Columnist Doug Sacks rants from the USA. You can argue with him here: doug@focus-worldwide.com
Business seemed to pick up around September. Best results are for those having contracts and business with the federal government. Business in Washington, DC is booming – the rest of the country, not so much. DC building construction is rampant and traffic [...]

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Columnist Alastair Tempest reports from his base in South Africa on use of data, transparency and privacy-related principles.
I guess most of us stop really worrying about ‘the purpose of life’ after those teenage angst years. We start to take purpose as a given and not really question it  – the purpose of being in business, [...]

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Columnist Ian Hughes rants about the latest issues affecting our industry. This time, he debates whether businesses should befriend social media and says: Elephants are not social, either!
Back in 2000, I remember giving lectures about the fact that businesses need to  get on to the Internet. ‘If you don’t, you will die,’ was my rough [...]

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Columnist Herschell Gordon Lewis takes a quick look at tiny but effective words and their usage among marketers.
First published in DMI, August 2003.
The World Wide Web has brought fresh emphasis to the value of proper word selection. Emailers who don’t know the difference between ‘eager’ and ‘anxious’, or, for that matter, the impact-difference between ‘a’ [...]

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At last, we have come of age, at last the DM industry can hold its head up and say: “We  have arrived!”. 
Why?  
Because we have been fined. Over the last few weeks, the biggest international direct marketing fine ever handed out by a regulator quietly surfaced and then disappeared.
The fine, $500,000,000, was not levied against [...]

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Marketing opt-out rates represent a major business threat – and a majority of brands say there’s an increase in consumers’ refusals to share personal data.
This is according to research from data permissioning experts Opt-4 and Royal Mail, whose ‘Permission Please’ survey showed for the first time that consumer behaviour varies according to the method of data [...]

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Forget the not-so-good ‘good old days’, says Douglas Sacks, we are fast-forwarding into the future……and that’s a scary place, too.
I am not a proponent of returning to the Good Old Days. History has shown that those days were not all that good anyway.
The famous example of slow communication is the Battle of New Orleans: fought [...]

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Columnist Ian Hughes discusses issues affecting our industry.
 
Nothing irritates me more than being ‘data raped’. You have a nice, cosy relationship with someone and before you know it they are using any information they have gleaned from you to stick it to you.
Imagine the scenario: I go in to buy a car, a used car. The [...]

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DMI columnist, Alastair Tempest – formerly director general of FEDMA, based in Brussels, has moved to a new role in Johannesburg, working with the Direct Marketing Association of Southern Africa (www.dmasa.org). From there, he sends his latest thoughts, on the dramatic rise of ‘mobi marketing’.
Has marketing arrived at its Age of Aquarius? The answer is certainly a [...]

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Jenny Moseley brings an update on cookie rules.
The EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive requires a website to gain consent from computer users before using tracking technology. The UK Law should have come into force on May 25, but Cookie Day (’C-Day’) has been shifted because the Government did not meet the 40-day deadline to [...]

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