All industries evolve. Things change, develop, improve. Direct Marketing is no different to any other sector, and the major change of the last ten years has been the growth of information technology. Is this a good thing? For me, the jury is still out. The first mailshot I organised, circa 1985, involved...
Exchange & Mart had a very small print circulation with barely 20,000 and falling, but its closure in print and move to online only publication is a story that is set to be repeated over and over this year. Quite how much is anyone's guess. With its position as a classified title the closure...
Just when the muse has left me, and I am wondering where the next blog will come from, another survey hits the streets. This one, from Experian, has some shocking statistics about duplicate mailings. Apparently, some scandalous B2B marketers are still de-duping by hand! Others - now sit down, because...
Following several recent conversations, I feel inspired to remind everyone of the facts behind business data. This is not a criticism, but it is a realistic view, because I sometimes think that with all the smoke and mirrors we use, we can forget what we are working with here. Data quality is relative...
Now here is a thought. Andy from Infouk replied to my last blog in defence of his new website and data quality. Good for him. Nice to see someone who is prepared to stand up and be counted. So why not challenge everyone to face a data MOT, to drive the systematic failures out of our B2B dataset. Obviously...
Infouk.com was not a disappointment...I am sure it works just fine. However, it is more of the same. Golly, an online counting tool...why didn't someone else think of that? Actually they did...they built it, put it out there, and discovered that hardly anyone used it. Maybe it is intended as a shop...
Two pieces of news hit me when I logged on tonight. One is Richard Thomas saying that boards ought to take more responsibility for data rather than leaving it to the IT boys, and the other was some piece of nonsense about data misuse being on the increase. Good grief, talk about shutting the stable door...
Prospect Swetenhams are no more. DLG, financed from Iceland, may be as shaky as West Ham United...and who's next? For those of you who have never worked through a recession, this is what it is like. No one knows what is going to happen next. No one knows when it will end. The only certainty out there...
The news yesterday that Prospect Swetenhams and Market Monitor are being merged into ICC by Bisnode is very sad. Especially for me. I played a pivotal role in creating Prospect Swetenhams out of The Prospect Shop and Swetenhams Marketing, and was MD when we purchased Market Monitor. Being owned by a...
The B2B press is great at times for cutting corners (not that we do that kind of thing here, of course, ahem), but this week's issue of Incisive Media's recently relaunched Computing & IT Week has a cracking example in its front page lead story. Under a big picture of a child a headline asks...
