Friday Report excoriates Direct Marketing Days.

While the Direct Marketing Association continues to float successful conferences and workshops (see Coming Event, below, for example), DMD Marketing Conferences took a blow from Friday Report newsletter in its lead story, "Troubled Times for Direct Marketing Days."

"'Is this what our business has come to?' said one of the many exhibitors we talked to during Direct Marketing Days in New York, this past week (May 21-24, 2001) at the New York Hilton Hotel," publisher Henry Reed Hoke writes. "It's ironic that this is the last year for the show at the Hilton since its birth in 1963. Next year it will be held at the Javits Center in NYC.... It's already being promoted as 'Bigger and Better.' We wonder.

"Attendance was awful this year. Most likely a record low for the event. Rumors ran rampant that paid registration, for the four-day event, was around 600. The heavily advertised '6,500 Marketers' were not there regardless of what anyone says. It couldn't have been farther from the truth."

Hoke took a clue from conference speaker Dianne Deacon, cofounder of The Creative Thinking Association, who advised marketers to "think outrageously." Hoke said DMD leadership should think "outside the box... Start thinking outrageously to rebuild these days and conferences, if that is possible."