General DM News & Commentary ↓

There was a pretty interesting article in a recent issue of The Circulator…and we felt it was very relevant to this blog’s content.

The article summarized a study conducted by Ball State University’s Center for Media Design in coordination with email provider ExactTarget. The study looked at marketing and communication preferences for a variety of different age groups, from 15-65.

The surprising part of the study was that a higher percentage of teens (age 15-17) were reported to be more influenced to buy something from direct mail (and email) than they were by advertising found on social media sites.

That stats were:

Direct Mail: 58% — Email: 42% — Social Media: 12%

Sites like MySpace and Facebook have enormous popularity with teens…and obviously social media advertising has its place in certain marketing plans because of it’s reach and cost effectiveness.

But when you go direct, especially with direct mail, the bottom line is you’ve got less competing for your prospect’s attention…and as a result, targeted messages get noticed more.

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We wanted to add a quick post with some thoughts about the recent DMA 2008 conference we just exhibited at in Las Vegas.

Exhibit Hall

There was a lot of pre-show discussion about the possible dismal attendance because of the economy…but the exhibit hall traffic was good and we ended up meeting 65 qualified prospects for our direct mail services, which is GREAT.

I’m not sure if other exhibitors would agree, and we tend to be more aggressive than most (not annoying though, I think)…but at the very least, the energy in the exhibit hall was definitely positive.

Learning Sessions

We didn’t get to attend any learning sessions, but I was told by many attendees that they were good…I only heard one negative comment and it was about one session in particular.

Exhibitors

As usual there was a ton of list and printing companies…yes, we fall into the printing category, but we’re not your usual printer. There was a healthy dosage of email marketing and promotional item companies…and we also noticed an increase in lead gen related companies.

Convention Center

The convention center was good in that it was pretty compact…to walk to the sessions, bathroom, food, etc. didn’t require a huge amount of effort. Thankfully, there was a Starbucks on the premise and I would say about 75% of attendees and exhibitors (including us) had cups in their hands in the morning.

The only negative thing about the location was, like Jacob Javits Center in NYC, to get to any decent restaurant for a lunch meeting required standing in a long line for a cab.

Conclusion

Overall, we give the DMA conference two thumbs up. Traffic was good…we met a lot of nice people…and it was in Las Vegas! Next year the conference is in San Diego, CA.

This post is a short one.

We love charts and graphs, especially ones about direct mail.

There was a study done recently by Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software and Mailing Systems Technology called Marketers’ Average Annual Direct Mail Activity.

Here are the results — where do you stand?

Big News: we’re going to be introducing video to this blog very soon. It’s just a test. If the videos are well-received, we’ll make them a regular thing.

We plan on posting the first one this Friday, May 2nd.

Keep in mind our specialty is direct mail production, NOT video production.