A look back at a look to information marketing's future.

Rummaging through my files, I found an article titled "Subscription DM" that I wrote for DM News, published November 1, 1989.

In many ways, this was a long time ago. The freshman class crowding college next fall was being born; first class postal rates had gone to a quarter the year before; and about a week later the Berlin Wall came down.. On the other hand, many news letters and direct mail packages look much as they did nearly 20 years ago.

How good was my crystal ball? I reread it with some trepidation. How smart or how dumb was I going to look in the glaring clarity of hindsight?

Rereading the piece, I saw that I fearlessly predicted mostly "more of the same" with traditional direct mail dominating newsletter marketing. I spent some column inches discussing things like "publisher's letters," computer personalization (then fairly new for smaller mailings), and whether reports or rumors of large companies blocking third-class pieces in the mail room would lead to more marketers again testing first class. These concerns are hardly in the fore front of newsletter marketers' thinking.

Where I missed

Some errors, of course. The use of forced-free-trial techniques expanded to more publishers and larger lists than I anticipated. Sample issue mailings, which I pretty much consigned to the boneyard of marketing history, do now seem to be making a bit of a comeback.

Overall, most of everything I wrote about newsletter direct mail marketing nearly 18 years ago still is true. As far as it went, for most of the next decade, I was pretty much on target.

Where I hit

"I'd like to be trendy and talk electronics," I wrote in 1989. "Publishers would like to be selling premium subs via fax or online (through services like NewsNet), but except for a very few like Walter Lynch's International Currency Report with subs from Anchorage to Abu Dhabi, reader demand doesn't seem to be there."

It would be years before that service became a demand.

At the newsletter association, we had our first computers, Macs. When we considered "networking," it was linking the computers in our office. Prior to that we had a Wang word processing system I liked a lot. I thought it did everything we needed. Who knew the thing you typed on could also do article research and help you track down old girlfriends?

E-mail and the internet just emerging

E-mail didn't then exist on any popular basis and the Internet and the WorldWideWeb were still little more than a gleam in AI Gore's eye. Today I would estimate that perhaps 80-90 percent of the new newsletter titles I encounter are available online only, and every publisher includes some element of e-mail and online marketing.

That leads me to wonder: What will subscription marketing look like in 2027? Will the humble print newsletter even still be around? Will there be more new technologies no one even knows about today that will "change everything."

I hope I'm around to see.