Direct marketing is not a job description that is likely to make you many friends at a dinner party – often I am greeted at best by a pondering frown, at worst by expletives that indicate fellow guests general discontentment at believing me to be the sole architect behind every single item of junk mail that they have ever received.

So why has the industry become tarred with such a bad name? To answer this question I will chart very briefly the cause of DM over the previous years in an attempt to identify the problems and challenges that face the industry today – and why it is that I am frequently frowned on by my fellow dinner-guests (take my word for – it isn’t for the lack of conversation!)

Direct Marketing came of age when the database became affordable and the knowledge to use such an instrument proliferated. Before that time direct marketing still existed – but obviously, with no database to process each prospect and keep the records clean, its efficiency was limited and its effectiveness questionable. In the UK, growth in the direct marketing industry came about in the 1980s, fuelled by the financial services sector – and here no doubt, someone who has recently received another unwelcome credit card offering in the post will probably try and blame me for the ‘boom and bust’ of Britain in that era! But nonetheless the contagion spread, charities, telecom, clothing; all joined the bandwagon – and by the 1990s the use of the database was central to the progress and effectiveness of this medium.

And here we come to the crux of the matter that is the reason people like me are given the cold-shoulder at dinner parties: the database is now so common and so accessible that any small firm of dubious practice can send out wave after wave of broadcasts or mailings, and the structure of these companies is such that immediate profiteering is given far greater prevalence than the quality of the data or the client’s actual needs.

So the pivotal matter is your database – bad DM is simply the result of bad data management. Take a brief example: Amazon – a company that’s built essentially around a database. Each time you buy something from them you are updating their database with your records, confirming your address, informing them of your product preferences, and, it might sound stupid to those of you not so familiar with DM horror stories, confirming that…that’s right…you’re still alive!

But even with this ability of tracking and updates, I still have my criticisms of Amazon: their DM is certainly not as tailored to the individual as it could potentially be. With perfect records of previous purchases, of favoured authors, musicians, and film genres, could they not segment their database into offerings that may actually interest me – not just a generic email that gives a very uninspiring offer off a selection of a very broad range of book genres or products.

However, Amazon are leagues ahead of 95% of other companies – at least their communications are driven by valid data, collected in a proper manner, targeted in an albeit somewhat more generalist manner than one might expect, but targeted nonetheless, and here we recognise one of the main reasons why DM is currently sneered at: data proliferation.

Due to the fragmentation of traditional segments of society from the 1970s that has continued apace to the present day, opportunities have arisen for ever-increasingly specific lists to be compiled by the canny marketer reflecting the tastes and passions of these ever more complex groupings. This has led to data becoming a valuable commodity, and such ‘data proliferation’ has contributed to a split in the DM industry: there is the first – the ‘quick sell’, where unprincipled marketers may sell on whatever data they can to make a quick buck and client priorities take a distant second place, and then there is the second – the Amazons of the world who use their data as the beginning of a CRM process aimed at customer retention.

It is the first of these divisions that has done so much to harm the reputation of DM, for these companies view DM as a simple numbers game where the ability to reach more people, despite the fact that the offering may be less relevant to any specific list (and receiving offerings of no relevance is often cited as the main reason why DM attracts so much bad press) is by far the greatest import. This has come about partly because of the marketing of lists: the more relevant it is the more expensive it is, and for profiteering marketers in division one, as we know, relevance takes second place to numbers.

And yet still they continue to ply their trade: and they can do this because, although they might not have the relevance or the consent of those who receive their mailings, be it electronic or other, even this form of DM still yields return enough to satisfy the client.

That is the sad truth of it: DM operations have become so cheap to deploy that it has attracted opportunists – in short, it is the victim of its own success. And what is it, do you wonder, that I say to any antagonist at my dinner party? I say it is the truth because it works, because people like my antagonist have the latest catalogue on their coffee table, because they’ve signed up for the latest newsletter, because they’re waiting for that next deal from Lastminute.com to come through to their inbox – they might not like all that they receive, but what they do like is enough to keep the ‘infernal machine’ running.