Let’s try to prevent blame game before the heat is on DM again

So now the Speaker is gone. It’s great to find someone to blame, isn’t it? It’s a game the British media love to play and direct marketers know it only too well – after all isn’t it those pesky “junk mailers” who are responsible for global warming?

Let’s get them. No matter that, in the end, the environmental impact of banning addressed mail from marketers would actually be relatively negligible. Or are we talking about doordrops? Or is it free newspapers? Or is it CRM communications from companies most people are already dealing with?

Does anyone actually know what most people consider to be “junk mail”? Didn’t think so.

But let’s blame “junk mail” for everything from identity fraud to climate meltdown to causing back injuries on our poor old posties. Unless it’s something that we really really want like the latest catalogue from our favourite retailer – then it’s valuable information.

My point here is that, as an industry, we need to get out in front of the debate on these issues – whether through an association or just through our own corporate initiatives – before, once again, the finger gets pointed. A space just opened on the front pages and the summer heat is coming fast – and you know they’ll want to find someone to blame for that.

The check on Swine Flu? It’s in the mail

Not only are our politicians claiming for everything from bath plugs to porn movies these days, they are using direct mail to teach us how to use a tissue when we sneeze – with a glossy five-colour leaflet sent to over 25 million homes in the UK.

What a complete waste of MORE taxpayers money, though I would love to have been the printer that got that job.

Even if Swine Flu does start to spread, will this really help? Personally I don't need to be told how to contain a sneeze and I’m pretty sure a pretty sizable portion of the population doesn’t need to be told either.

Maybe they should have targeted the mailing better by sending it to all the people who live in caves, or have no TV, radio or internet, or those whose only source of news on the world around them is Jeremy Kyle and Trisha Goddard – we could have assisted them with that and reduced the enormous amount of paper and ink used in this disastrous attempt at scare mongering.

In all the panic, our politicians and the media seem to have failed to realise that flu in a bad year kills on average 24,000 people in the UK alone and that so far we have only around 70 confirmed cases of Swine Flu – all treatable with medication.

Honestly, the government and the press seem to collude on anything to take our minds off the banking and political crisis. What’s next, a parliamentary debate on Katie and Peter splitting up?

The DMA’s radical restructuring: too little too late?

It’s about time the Direct Marketing Association did something – anything – radical, and restructuring its management is the place it should have started long ago.

The DMA has been an organisation badly in need of new thinking and it has failed to make an impact over the past couple of years when the industry has been in great need – when it has come under attack from populist politicians and from equally populist newspapers.

The direct mail part of the industry has been particularly battered and no one inside the DMA has been willing to really come out and fight on its behalf. We all know the arguments about “junk mail” being annoying and not particularly green. In response, the DMA has produced a lot of targets and paperwork for its members but has done little to demonstrate that direct mail is actually not doing as much environmental damage as is generally believed and can be useful – and certainly wanted by its recipients – when targeted properly.

Try weighing the free newspapers that drop on your doormat each week – many of which are published by the owners of the aforementioned populist newspapers – or the emails, web pages other online content printed off in the average office each day. Compare that with the amount of addressed mail most people get. Then tell me mail is the real tree-killer.

But no one from the DMA is out there on a daily basis making the industry’s case effectively to the public (through the media) or to the politicians.

Ideally, the new restructuring that was recently announced would see the DMA more focused on those tasks – and hopefully the association would bring in some dynamic, articulate, telegenic and quick-thinking bright spark to lead the charge.

But I have some serious doubts that anything like that will happen. And if it doesn’t, DMA members need to seriously consider taking matters into their own hands – maybe what they should do is simply pull their fees and put them into their own PR to promote the interests of the industry, without all the internal politics.