Members of the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) and the Electronic Retailing Association (ERA) are bracing for the impact of the war in Iraq on the DM industry.
“Members are concerned that business is going to drop off dramatically as [the war] becomes real in people’s minds,” said H. Robert Wientzen, president and CEO of the DMA. “If you go back and look at the Gulf War and what happened after 9/11, we will see a notable drop in consumer activity, and a reasonably significant drop in business-to-business activity as well.”
Wientzen noted that the DMA has seen significant interest in publications it has produced on how to prepare for the war. Over 600 members requested a white paper produced in February, and over 1,500 clickthroughs in less than 24 hours were received in response to a list of wartime management tips in its e-newsletter.
The DMA is advising members that this is obviously not the best time to kick off a new marketing effort.
“You probably want to think twice about conducting any marketing campaign that you can hold up on now,” he said. “Our view is that it’s probably not good business anyway. From a common sense standpoint, it might not be received kindly by a lot of folks. And it’s not likely to be effective at this point in time anyhow.
Barbara Tulipane, interim CEO of ERA, noted that her association’s membership is more concerned with the state of the world at the moment, rather than whether their DRTV spots are running.
“Its very hard to be running a direct response spot or an infomercial in the middle of a war crisis,” she said. “At a time like this, [our members] certainly want to be sensitive, so if the networks pull [programming] and preempt with news, they’re very supportive of that.”
In fact, right now its almost more frustrating when the infomercials run as planned. On networks such as Lifetime that don’t preempt for 24/7 news coverage, a crawl of news updates often runs along the bottom of the screen on all programming, including infomercial airtime committed to months earlier.
“Not to sound shallow, but they’re paying for time when people are reading news,” said Tulipane. “But in the spirit of what is happening right now, you’re not going to hear anybody grumble about that.”
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