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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Nick Martin discusses innovation and a new kind of ‘personal assistant’
Speaking at the Travel Technology Initiative’s Innovation Summit (London) last year, Continental Airlines’ senior director of merchandising and ancillary revenue, Chris Amenechi, said the industry would have more intelligent approaches to the phone.
“Wouldn’t you rather talk to someone who knew you and you can talk [...]

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In this column, US-based Doug Sacks discusses recent events in Japan, the Middle East, India and South America.
It’s a difficult time to concentrate on business affairs with so much global news and tragedy. Japan leads the list enduring a 1-2-3 punch of earthquake, tsunami and nuclear emergency.
Ironically, no country in the world better prepares for [...]

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Columnist Ian Hughes regularly rants about issues affecting our industry. This time he discusses: Coming of age and going public during DM’s digital era.
Decades from now, people will look back and say: “2012 was the year when everything changed.” I say this with a very clear sense that I will be proved right.
Google is talking about issuing [...]

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Permission marketing experts Rosemary Smith and Jenny Moseley measure the long arm of data protection laws.
The question, ‘which law applies when data from individuals in one country is collected in another?’ is a perennial one.
Where marketers are ‘pushing’ their messages to specific individuals, the applicable law depends on the channel used.
In the offline world that [...]

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