Live From DMDNY: John Greco’s Process Thinking

Whatever you do, don’t call direct marketing an industry around DMA president John Greco.

“It’s a process, in which we interactively engage with buyers, collect information and improve experience,” he said during a welcoming speech at the Direct Marketing Days New York conference.

Call direct marketing what you will, it’s getting bigger, influencing or directly accounting for $1.94 trillion in sales annually. And within that, online marketing is playing an increasingly larger role: At $338.9 billion and growing, online marketing is poised to overtake telemarketing (which currently accounts for $393.1 billion) as the second-largest slice of the DM pie, lagging only direct mail at $517.1 billion.

Greco’s thinking is currently focused on how marketers can take advantage of Web 2.0. Loosely defined, Web 2.0 includes consumer-created-and-controlled media such as blogs, product reviews, social networks such as MySpace and online alternative societies such as Second Life.

“The next generation of interactive communication, social media (Web 2.0) holds tremendous promise for marketing directly,” Greco said. “User-generated content offers exploding capacity for viral communication, and a range of interface possibilities.”

In reference to the brick-and-mortar world, Greco called for unity within the direct marketing community, especially in light of postal rate increases and potential do-not-mail registries: Currently, 15 states are considering the latter, Greco said.

He also asked that marketers using e-mail implement e-mail authentication practices and make opt-out mechanisms easy and effective.