Same As It Ever Was
WE’RE 10! We’re 10! Oh happy day! Yeah! Does that mean we get to ride our bikes after dark now?
OK, so DIRECT is celebrating its first decade of publication. You didn’t expect us to start acting mature now, did you?
Where were you 10 years ago? In 1988, some of my editorial colleagues were reporting on this fine industry back in the halcyon days of Ronald Reagan and New Kids on the Block. But not me.
Back to the Future Let’s indulge in a bit of late-’80s, early-’90s nostalgia, shall we? Ten years ago, I was not reporting on direct marketing. Heck, 10 years ago I wasn’t even that direct responsive. As I recall, I only had one magazine subscription, to Rolling Stone. (I’m pretty sure my mother ordered it through a stampsheet program, if you’re that interested.) I doubt I had ever called an 800 or 900 number. And my only catalog buying experience was ordering candy from Swiss Colony to send to out-of-town relatives at Christmas.
Not that the DR business was missing out on big bucks from my pockets. In October 1988, I was five months out of college and three months into my first “real” job. Needless to say, I was not rolling in the dough.
Most of this year’s college graduates are in the same boat. But they’re entering the business world with technological advances that weren’t available when I began my reporting career in the prehistoric, pre- “Seinfeld,” pre-Spice Girls stone age.
Heck, I had never even seen a fax machine until I started my first full-time job, as a reporter for a chain of weekly newspapers in Rhode Island. What a beauty of a fax machine it was, too. One of those space age jobs that used rolls of thermal paper-you know, the kind that turns yellow after about a week.
Jetson!!! But the fact the office had a fax machine made the place look like Spacely Sprockets compared with my next job, in a small Boston book and magazine publishing house. While the company did a healthy little mail order business, it did not have a fax and didn’t take credit cards. Or use Federal Express. Or rent or exchange its mailing list. Or rent outside files to prospect for new subscribers. (I think the septuagenarian publisher thought the whole concept of list rental crass and uncouth. Remind me to send her an invitation to next year’s List Day.)
This year’s lucky graduates have not only the benefits of fax machines (with real paper, I hope), but something as a non-techhead I had no idea existed, the Internet. When I began reporting on direct marketing four and a half years ago, the concept of ‘Net and Web marketing was in its infancy. I can now openly admit that I wrote my first Web marketing stories without ever having seen America Online, let alone the Internet. (Hey, I’ll further admit that I was one of those souls so confused I thought that AOL was the Internet. And I was even more befuddled by the concept of this other thing called the “World Wide Web.” How do I subscribe to that?)
Today, I’m a lot more online savvy-as is the rest of the world, DM and otherwise. Chances are you’re probably reading this while you’re at or on your way to the Direct Marketing Association’s fall conference in San Francisco. But you could be reading it on our Web site (www.directmag.com), an important part of our marketing mix that didn’t exist a decade ago. Web addresses are now as essential on a DR print ad as a toll-free number.
When I started writing for DIRECT, desktop Internet access was something in the future-not quite up there with flying cars, but still down the road. (Even though my beau’s a techie, we didn’t even have Web access at home. Go figure.) Now, it’s hard to imagine not having the Web as a daily resource.
Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go In 1988, I was green and raw enough as a reporter to think I knew everything. Now, wizened, aged and aching 10 years later, I’ve smartened up enough to know there’s a heck of a lot more that I don’t know than what I do.
How has the decade been to direct marketing? That’s what we wanted to know. For a gander at the past, present and future of the direct marketing biz, check out our special report beginning on page 71.
I’ll be along in a minute, just as soon as I dust off my Duran Duran albums (albums, remember those?), make the beau put on a skinny tie and see if there are any “Family Ties” reruns on cable. So sue me-I liked the ’80s.
