A Library of Consumers: How ‘everyone’ Guides Your Marketing
For brands, those books represent consumers. Each one holds a unique story of interests, habits, motivations and aspirations. But unless you know where to look, your marketing risks becoming guesswork: broad, unfocused, and ultimately inefficient.…
Celebrating 25 years of PDV
It’s hard to believe that 25 years has passed since PDV first began delivering direct marketing in April 2000. On one hand, 25 years feels like a long time, while on the other, April 2000 feels like the recent past to some of us! This was the year…
Why are Fundraisers returning to Direct Mail (Part 2)
Why Fundraisers Are Reassessing Direct Mail in 2024 Back in 2023, I wrote about the resurgence of Direct Mail in fundraising. Charities were facing a perfect storm: economic pressure, shifting regulations, and the challenge of donor engagement. A…
Experian and the ICO
About a month ago, the disagreement between the ICO and Experian finally headed towards closure with the following sentence: “The Information Commissioner’s Appeal is dismissed.” This succinct statement was followed up by 57 closely written pages of…
Agencies Marking Their Own Homework
This week I’ve been reminded of a phrase that follows all agencies around. I asked a charity to upload all of the donors they’d recruited since the drop date of their last Direct Mail campaign. I wanted to show them how many people had received a DM…
Busting Myths in Direct Mail
I’ve worked in printed media for most of my life and a great deal of that has involved Direct Mail. It’s a much-loved format but for many people it’s viewed with nostalgia, like a Ford Capri, or Debbie Harry. There are a few…
Direct Marketing in the Maelstrom
I don’t often lament the fate of marketers. We have a lovely job and generally a lot of fun doing it. That said, with the cost-of-living crisis and the current economic turmoil, we might be forgiven for feeling like our job has become unnecessarily…
CDP, SCV, CRM: TMI
Platform your LTA isn’t cutting it but you can’t switch to MTA or MMM because your CRM isn’t a CDP so can’t deliver you an SCV – sort it out PDQ! Even amongst the ‘Three-Letter-Acronym’ besotted English-speaking (texting) world, the data-driven…
Why Is Everyone Talking About Legitimate Interests
"…examples of processing that may be processing that is necessary for the purposes of a legitimate interest include … processing that is necessary for the purposes of Direct Marketing," Explosive stuff, no? Well… maybe. This is a clause that…
How much data should I test?
I have some sympathy with people who need to buy data for their direct mail campaigns. Apart from learning the bewildering range of different data types and sources and understanding all the things that have been expressed to the data subject while…