I posted last week about my thoughts that the DMA is not doing a great job servicing the email marketing community. Based on Matt Blumberg's comments, I sent a copy of the posting to John Greco at the DMA. I have to say that I am impressed. John sent me an email the next day stating that "email is very much on my radar screen".
Today I received two phone calls from DMA staffers about my message. I didn't have a chance to spend any time with them on the phone, but plan to call them back. Maybe change is really happening.
I am curious to know if there was any followup on this or if the calls were simply meant to pacify you. To say that email is on someone's radar screen means little, and I think your original assumption that the DMA does little for email marketers is spot on.
I am a smaller, niche marketer in the IT industry. I average between 400,000 and 700,000 outgoing email messages each month.
Each month I read Direct Magazine, B@B and others and it seems when the DMA takes a stand on anything it is more for supporting the big direct mail marketers. I've read some absolutely ridiculous articles on email marketing and even written responses to them.
The DMA is a huge disconnect, at least for me and my company and needs to provide more than just "Best Practices" white papers (I like to think of them as white washes) and position papers and get down into more nitty gritty work, like working with the larger ISP's to understand the needs of legitimate email marketers and not make it so easy for us to be blacklisted. It's very much like the credit reporting services. Anyone can say your credit is bad, but try removing a bad record. Pulling teeth is easy in comparison.
The DMA should do more than posture, otherwise they are no better than politicians and their "campaign via soundbites" approach to voters.
Posted by: Ben Ice | October 28, 2004 at 03:34 PM