Email marketing continues to grow unabated despite the down economy. Companies use email for retention, acquisition, PR and BtoB lead generation.

The answer is partially "no" because today's branding advertising sells product harder than ever drawing closer to the direct marketing approach. Few clients allow their agencies to simply position the product.

It comes about innocently enough from general agencies and large advertisers whose dropping sales are forcing them into the new world (for them) of the direct response strategy.

Suppliers to agencies, here's a disturbing question for you. When your agency contracts with outside suppliers, will the agency pay your bill if their client does not pay? The agency... right? Wrong.

The advent of the internet phenomenon has attracted many new players to the direct marketing space. This is welcome news to professional direct marketers. But there is one area that continues to frustrate us.

In the so called "good old days", the big communication challenge for direct marketers was to translate marketing objectives to database mainframe programmers.

Note the terrible letter below I just received from a local car dealer. (If you are a car dealer or car salesman, please stop abusing direct response advertising polluting direct mail with double meanings and outright lies.)

o let's agree up front that a "lead" is not a suspect, a telephone list of companies in a certain industry or any person who has not raised his hand and said: "I'm interested, tell me more.”

There are essentially three ways marketers will respond to today's quickly evolving marketing environment. The first type responds quickly on impulse,