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.